This April began with thoughts of Eudora Welty, grande dame of American letters.

In Nevada City, as friends planted squash seeds on the night of the March full moon, American History professor Heather Cox Richardson, author of a daily blog entitled “Letters from an American” wrote about the urgency of planting wheat in Ukraine’s breadbasket region.

The food community around the world is helping support the Ukrainian people.

As March got underway, snow fell on cedars in the Sierra foothills. It also fell on the beleaguered nation of Ukraine and its brave citizenry.

Mark Rothko—born Marcus Yakovelevich Rothkowitz in 1903—was an American abstract painter of Latvian Jewish descent.

In late December, an epic snow and ice event brought life in the Sierra Foothills above Nevada City to a standstill.

This week the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Super Bowl XVI in Los Angeles, and Valentine’s Day in Nevada City all got me to thinking about chocolate.

As the 2022 Winter Olympics were about to get underway in Beijing last week, I had an intriguing text that took me back forty years to my first trip to China.

One of the simple joys in life is a pot of homemade soup. Winter, spring summer or fall, soup is always a welcome addition to a meal.

Gardens take root in the imagination. Some are simple, contained in pots conveniently arranged on a porch. Others are over the moon.

In this time when Delta and Omicron Covid variants continue to have us cooking at home rather than eating out, I find myself traveling the culinary world via the pages of cookbooks.

Silence is a sound that comes with living in a forested world above the snowline. For me, it is an old friend I’ve lived with happily in prior chapters of my life.

English novelist Jane Austen was born the seventh of eight children in the village rectory of Steventon, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775.

This predawn winter morning, icy patches of white still cover regions of the Sierra Foothills above the snowline where we live.

While housebound in the Sierra foothills following a three-day snow event last week, I caught up on articles that I’ve been saving for just such a day.

A week ago, the Sierra Foothills had its first dusting of snow.

There is something magical in the air in Nevada City these days. Colorful Christmas lights began going up in yards over the Thanksgiving weekend all around these wooded foothills.

A signed copy of National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry’s 1985 portrait of a 12-year-old Afghan girl hangs in our living room here in the Sierra Foothills.

Seasonally speaking, a spectacular showing of fall colors were on display from October into November here in the Sierra Foothills. Our neighbors proclaimed it to be the best autumn they’ve ever experienced.

In 2014, I flew with my longtime friend Chomsri to Istanbul where we stayed at the elegant Pera Palace Hotel—built in 1892 for passengers arriving from Europe aboard the Orient Express Railway.