A Woman in Time by Bobi Conn is set in rural Appalachian Kentucky between 1899 and 1939, amidst the backdrop of the Prohibition Era and reminiscent of Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, set in Virginia's Appalachian region.
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The route dropped us right into the middle of quaint Munising, a small town nestled on Lake Superior, home to under 2,000 people. While there, we quickly became acquainted with the fact that this part of Michigan, sitting atop Wisconsin, is known as the Upper Peninsula. Munising sits in a natural harbor within Lake Superior. Directly north of it, Grand Island sits out a few miles from shore and is accessible via a ferry, though we didn’t make it there during our 2-day stay.
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Read Mountain Preserve is a 243-acre forested area of land placed in a conservation easement to be enjoyed by the public. On our first visit, we hiked a 3.5 mile loop trail up to Buzzards Rock. On our return trip described in this post, we hiked a 4.6 mile loop. We've now hiked nearly all the paths in this park, except the green trail, which is a cutover between a couple of others.
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Read Mountain Preserve is a 243-acre forested area of land placed in a conservation easement to be enjoyed by the public. The Preserve is surprisingly tucked away in a subdivision in Roanoke, Virginia. Literally between two houses is a small county park sign with a paved road that looks little different from the neighboring driveways.
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We are lucky to live in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountain city of Roanoke, Virginia, a valley with endless outdoor activities and amazing vistas. In this post, we capture many of the area hikes and waterfalls we have explored more in depth.
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In the humid Virginia summer, we packed our bags, loaded up our trusty car, and prepared to set out on a nine-day road trip to four out of the five Great Lakes. The night before had seen strong thunderstorms and torrential rain, a relatively common summer phenomenon. But the amount of rain and devastation it caused were deemed a once in a one-thousand year flood.
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The Great Lakes are a unique and - in our minds - an underappreciated feature of the United States. Left behind from glacier craters and meltwater after the end of the last ice age, the immense fresh water lakes are the largest source of surface freshwater in the world when their area is combined and hold 21% of the globe’s fresh water.
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As I shared in our prior post which you can read here, we are the new owners of a 130-acre plot of mountain land, which we have named Laurel Ridge, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of our home state of Virginia. In hiking the multiple trails already cleared, we have come across really interesting features as well as various found objects (about which we’ll write more in the future). We quickly found ourselves with a lengthy list of all the really cool things we want to do, as well as some of the less fun but practical necessities like clearing brush from the trails before nature takes over.
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For years we have talked about the idea of buying a chunk of land as our own personal getaway for hiking, camping, and relaxing. For most of those years, the reality was quite a ways out of reach. A distant dream at best.
In the past handful of years it become less distant, more possible, and I spent more hours than I’d like to count trolling realtor.com and zillow.com to check out available land. In the first six months of COVID, we began looking a bit more seriously because after all, you can’t get much safer than your own private, isolated vacation spot.
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Rocky shorelines topped with stately evergreens. The zebra striped lighthouses situated on outcrops. Water that just looks cold, teaming with fish and lobster, many of which will have a second life in the seafood industry. New England style homes that look prepared to weather winter’s winds and equally designed to open all their windows to soak up the northern summer sun. Whatever else it is, Maine is a sensory experience.
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In our prior post, we shared what led us to attempt making our own soap. We covered the tools we used, the fun choices we made (like soap color and scent), and the process we followed. While everything seemed to go well, the question remained: Would this soap actually work?
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People who know Joan - the doctors she works with at the hospital, her boss, her new neighbor, her brother - are pretty sure she is not okay. Joan isn’t sure why they can’t just leave her be - let her work constantly, keep her apartment minimally furnished, and skip out on holiday bashes.
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The story is familiar. A Sunday morning bacon breakfast, seared steaks on the skillet. What they make gets transferred to plates and devoured. What they leave behind is a goopy, fatty mess in the frying pan.
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Language of loss and love suffuce the novel with poignant descriptions that cut to the bone of life. The unstated question which echoes throughout is: What is worth dying for? Is it love, is it loss, is it a belief in a political state? Krishan, the main character, may be on the verge of asking a new question: What is worth living for?
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Life is all about perspective.
We went camping for a couple of nights earlier this summer at Loft Mountain Campground, a short drive up Skyline Drive, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains about an hour northwest of Charlottesville.
Our SUV was packed to the gills with all matter of perishable and non-perishable human and dog supplies. Also humans and dogs. We had to dig our camping box out of the basement and dust it off. Somehow we hadn’t gone camping in 8 years. This is one of those unnerving moments of adulthood where something that feels familiar and recent hasn’t occurred in many years.
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We spent a week in Paris back in April 2019. With everything that has happened since, that truly seems like a lifetime ago and a galaxy away. If you think a week in Paris is enough time to see everything on a standard first-timer’s list, think again.
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What publisher would risk publishing a book under this title? You can sure it is one who has a hell of a lot of confidence that this will, in fact, be one hell of a book. My verdict: a resounding yes.
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As we looked up at the heights of the mesa, we could see teeny tiny people atop it and, while it was hard to envision how it would happen, it was clear we had just chosen to scale it. Yikes!
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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is part crime novel, part animal rights activism, part a tale about aging, and part a tale about living as an outsider in your own community. Sprinkle in a dose of mysticism and astrology, and this is a book that is more than the sum of its parts.
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Much has been made about the urban and rural divide in America, a topic that reached new urgency as pundits, pollsters, and social scientists sought to make sense of the 2016 presidential election. Overnight, books such as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy became best-sellers. A national narrative was told by reporters from Big City, USA, popping in to visit rural Kentucky and other rural spots, to identify their “otherness”.
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