The white farmhouse cabin on Big Lake was built on a hillside so that it had to stand on stilts, and underneath in the crook between the bottom of the cabin and the sloping hill were all good things, like boats and paddles and canoes and coolness and must. Inside it had a woodstove, a Fisher stove or potbelly stove, […]

What is reality? Is reality only what I look around and see – and touch? Or is reality only limited by my imagination? I mean, I’m certainly not tethered to reality. If there was an alternate reality, I’d entertain it. No, I have not started this column on gummies. I want to contemplate reality because I was planning on entertaining […]

I first “met” author and WCCO radio personality Darragh Aldrich when friend Tom Haeg gave me his father Larry’s book, Lady in Law: A Biography of Mabeth Hurd Paige. (Find out more about Paige, a feminist, reformer, and state legislator until 1945, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabeth_Hurd_Paige.) I write about Darragh Aldrich because she and her husband Chilsen Darragh Aldrich had a cabin […]

Picture a beige moonscape. Imagine each crater inflating to a tall stone mushroom— a fairy chimney. Paint a dazzling blue sky with sun articulating each dune-like shadow by day and transforming it to luminous rose and magenta at dusk. Waft a few blue-and-red-striped hot-air balloons above, and you’re in Cappadocia, Turkey’s geologic marvel. I love Cappadocia, and the Kelebek is […]