My command of Dutch is pretty rudimentary, but I get the drift of this site and think it’s absolutely fabulous. The Repair Café is where you take those small appliances, old chairs, ripped trousers or anything else that needs repair and get them fixed by volunteers. Imagine! Usually we end up throwing something away...
I’ve been hiding out the last few days. A cold whacked me Saturday, and although I tried hard through Sunday to pretend it was going to disappear overnight, by Monday I had to cave in. So I’ve been lying low. Still, yesterday afternoon was glorious. I just had to take a walk, and that’s...
Most of my life I have lived within walking distance of at least some amenities. As a child I could walk to Dornell’s grocery store. To my child eyes the Dornells were beyond old, though they were likely younger than I am now. My mother found useful things there, such as bread and milk....
He’s in my cohort, but Don Tapscott has a mind that floats freely, not tethered by age, time or space. He looks at the generation that has Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World and likes what he sees. While some worry about the impact of technology, Tapscott sees its...
My friend Judith and I were walking in the glorious light of late-afternoon sun today. Our route took us past a bed of tulips that seemed to grow from tight buds to open flowers in two days. Among the masses of red tulips, the occasional errant yellow stood out. The same was true among...
When Marion Sinclair won the 1934 Victorian Girl Guides competition for writing an Australian round, she likely never dreamed one day campers in Idaho would be singing it. And when I was belting out these words along with my fellow campers, I never dreamed I’d hear a kookaburra. Kookaburra sits in the old gum...
The difference between these quirky dining experiences and my aunt’s open-door policy is that the former come and go. My aunt made plain, farm-style cooking so delicious my memories still sing. Only problem was, there were never enough people to eat it. So anyone who came to the door unannounced was a welcome guest....
I grew up in a farming area, where the labour of Mexican migrants was essential and taken for granted. It never occurred to me to wonder why so many skilled farmers had to leave their own country in order to make a living. It was many years before I understood the long history of...
It isn’t often we use “bank” and “heart” in the same sentence, but Le Crédit Municipal de Paris is a bit unusual. For one thing, it was started by a philanthropist as a “Mont-de-piété” or bank for the poor. For another, it has survived nearly four centuries on low-interest loans and turned 375...
In spite of her extraordinary heroism, Irena Sendlerova might have quietly slipped into the anonymity of history had a Kansas teacher not kept a clipping from the U.S. News and World Report. In the 1994 article Richard Z. Chesnoff wrote about “The Other Schindlers”, people who risked their lives to save Jews from the...
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