There is always a story that connects us with food. And sometimes there is a book and movie as well.

I’ve never forgotten the taste of my first, fresh-off-the-tree sour cherry. It was late June in the Midwest.

My pal Louise Dusenbery just turned 98 this week. She and I have a special history.

There are times when life gives you lemons and you are left to make the best of the situation.

Economic and political news is depressing these days, to say the least.

In October 1948, Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote an inspiring open letter to America’s students.

On the final morning of a rainy May, a solitary cinnamon-brown bird emerges from the leafy shadows at the edge of our Missouri woods.

Language has the power to connect us over distance and time.

In dark times when the world becomes too much, I feel the need re-root myself in memories that provide a sense of balance in a world that has gone upside down.

When does a lifetime of letter writing begin?

Packing for a trip to London in late November 2016, I tucked along some recipes to share with our niece Kashya who was hosting a multi-generational gathering of Salters from Missouri and Madrid.

With April, the possibility of an early spring snow is always in the air.

We cannot understand events of today unless we understand where we have been as a nation and world. History matters.

While I was still living in Missouri, my “Book Club of Two” friend Marjo Price loaned me her own copy of Where the Crawdads Sing.

As spring gets underway, young people around the world have been moved by the devastating war in Ukraine.

This April began with thoughts of Eudora Welty, grande dame of American letters.

In Nevada City, as friends planted squash seeds on the night of the March full moon, American History professor Heather Cox Richardson, author of a daily blog entitled “Letters from an American” wrote about the urgency of planting wheat in Ukraine’s breadbasket region.

The food community around the world is helping support the Ukrainian people.

As March got underway, snow fell on cedars in the Sierra foothills. It also fell on the beleaguered nation of Ukraine and its brave citizenry.

Mark Rothko—born Marcus Yakovelevich Rothkowitz in 1903—was an American abstract painter of Latvian Jewish descent.