cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
Dinner or supper? I used the terms interchangeably most of my life until I was invited to an Epiphany dinner. The meal was elegant and intentionally derived to mark what the prior year had held for each dinner guest. Epiphany is the season in the church calendar when we feast to celebrate the wise men’s…
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On the morning before the rest of our group arrives, Tracy and I follow Google Maps through the twisting, narrow, congested streets of old Istanbul to a cafe I’ve found. I want a famous Turkish breakfast spread. The kind with multiple breads, meats, cheeses, olives, honeys, and jams. The kind that makes you linger into…
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We cross the Bosphorus Strait via a steamer ferry that has been running nonstop for decades, so we can wander through my old neighborhood. Europe to Asia. Two continents split a city that knows more splits than I can count. On the hill above, the newest and biggest mosque is rivaled in height by the…
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I’d booked a room of my own for a week at a lodge on the outskirts of Cosby, Tennessee—a town too sleepy to care if you call it the middle of nowhere. Set just off a creek where horses grazed freely on miles of green meadow, the lodge I’d chosen had a wraparound deck, a…
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The estimated time of arrival on my GPS read 4:12 a.m. That meant my head could hit the pillow by 4:15 a.m., which would give me a solid 2 hours and 45 minutes of sleep before my kids were ready to start the day. Earlier that day, I decided to make the 5-hour drive to…
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When life tosses you an unexpected moment, you have a few options. Examine your possibilities, jump ship, or quickly come up with a plan and say yes without dwelling on the potential risks. I tend to live my life aligned with the last one. My good friend Alyssa and I had talked about getting away…
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Although I grew up in a large city (Detroit), I only inhabited one small part of it, what is locally known as the east side. Woodward Avenue divided the east side from the west side of Detroit, and I had no reason to cross Woodward Avenue. Everything I needed was available on the east side,…
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First, I wrote Leyla. She was a teen I thought my own teen girls might like. Leyla was for them. A Turkish girl, wandering the old city, who falls into an epic adventure to uncover a secret passed among women for two millennia. As she learns to embrace her own strength, she must also accept…
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It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. As accurate as this aphorism is, the frame often says more than the picture. The picture captures our attention, but without the frame, our eyes would wander over the painting without focus and intentionality. This became exceedingly clear as I looked through an old…
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Mom leaned her head out from the balcony of the InterContinental Paris Le Grand. “You can practically hear the joy out in the streets!” she exclaimed. She was right, of course. Paris is always bright, but at Christmas time, it twinkles, and all of the cars, pedestrians, and little shops seem to twinkle with it.…
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