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I watched a young woman shoot one of her Galloway breeding bulls with a hunting rifle, and the atmosphere, the ritual itself, and the logic behind it, as well as the surrounding area, which looked a lot like South Tyrol, the part between Italy and Austria where I am from originally, made me smile.
January is almost over and I still haven’t written my review of the year we just left behind. I don’t like walking backward into the future but feel I would if I don’t lay last year down to rest as a memory. It was an eventful year. Twelve months full of challenges, successes, and failures. Great movies and wonderful books were part of my journey, as were plastic bottles and dirty tubs.
Our farm was with one foot in Italy, so Italian food and liquors could be found in our fridge and cellar all year around. I grew up enjoying the Austrian-Hungarian meals at home, and appreciated the German cooking during the week, even though it was in a boarding school, and some of the food they served seemed highly questionable.
Homemade Christmas gifts. How much we appreciate and cherish them, yet we seldom take the time to make them ourselves. Perhaps this could be the year when many of us will remember the wonderful tradition, and we will spend time making presents instead of buying them?
And just like that, we are back in saving mode, all it took was a head of Nappa cabbage. It’s not like I didn’t notice it before, but like so many of us, I tried for a while not to think about it. That changed, when we paid $13.99 for a five-pound head of Nappa Cabbage, that’s when I hit the breaks hard. My husband, the brave man beside me on our life’s journey, as so often, didn’t know what hit him, even though he knows I can be impulsive, perhaps sometimes even a bit dramatic. I am female, what can I say?
Seven weeks have passed since I started the chemo-drug Methotrexate. Sadly, my dose has increased, which seems to be normal -a fact they didn’t share with me at first. Once a week, I meet the Nightingales, that’s what I call them. A form of endearment, a tribute to Florence Nightingale and all the others who followed in her footsteps, and take care of us when we need them the most.
“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself, it‘s also THE FLINCH.
Easter is a wonderful time to get creative. I love to make Suprise Cake Eggs, which are so easily done, and everybody loves them. All it takes is two or three dozen fresh eggs and your favorite cake or brownie mix. Right out of the box -not too time-consuming but fun to make. Of course, you can make your own cake batter if you prefer.
The second most important paycheck in my life was the one my husband brought home two weeks after we had moved to Memphis. Seven and a half months after we had lost our home and almost everything in it, we looked at the check and acted like children.
I visited Russia twice. The first time when it was still the USSR and ten years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From an early age on I had decided I would not like Russia or the Russian people. I didn’t need the COLD WAR or politics to tell me what to feel and what to believe. I had heard enough stories from German, Italian and Austrian soldiers when I grew up. So many had been prisoners of war in Russia during WWII, including my own father. The fact that all of them made a difference between Russia as a country, the Russian people, and their government was ignored by me on purpose. Isn’t it all the same?