When I first met Lynchburg native Brooke Pettyjohn in the summer of 1997, she was out on her porch painting that quintessential piece of Americana: a white picket fence. With visions of Tom Sawyer toiling in my head, I was surprised to learn that while she was in fact, painting a picket fence, it wasn’t [...]

In eighth grade, the girls in my middle school were required to take one year of Home Economics. The course was cleverly divided into two sections: cooking and baking the first semester, followed by sewing the second semester. Our teacher, Mrs. Blythe, (who wore a flour-dusted apron to match her flour-dusted hair) taught us to make [...]

Sacre bleu! I knew there had to be a reason that I am a bit of a Francophile. Along with champagne, Monet, Gerard Depardieu and wine bars, the French are generally credited with having developed what has become the modern incarnation of the armchair. In fact, the word armchair (chaise a bras) was coined in [...]

Bad loans, bailouts, foreclosures, layoffs… reports of the grim state of our economy are front and center these days, and everyone is paying attention. While it’s distressing and uncertain, the upside is that in many ways, living leaner is an exercise in creative thinking. Instead of producing and consuming with no thought to the future, [...]

For some of us, the arrival of spring means one thing: Gardening season is here! As elemental as breathing, the simple act of turning over
sleepy soil, planting seeds and lovingly maintaining your section of earth that will eventually bear flowers or vegetables renews us year after year. Lucky for the gardener, each season brings new [...]

By Alison Cox
As a child growing up in upstate New York, it wasn’t the snow that signaled the arrival of the holidays (there was snow all the time). Nor was it the annual television viewing of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman” that we watched snuggled up under a green blanket while [...]