I doubt my eyes will be open at midnight tonight. I know for sure I won’t be wearing yellow panties, despite the good luck they promise. (I don’t own yellow panties. Bad color for me. But, on this New Year’s Eve of 2011, I will be mopping and throwing the dirty bucket water out the [...]

…meet your future mandolin player. She can kind of play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. And tune the thing. Get ready. So yes, city folk, we’re taking mandolin lessons around here. Even I grab the lovely piece and hit it some. La Nena also is taking two other classes after school. That’s three extra-curricular activities…There are [...]

I used to know where all the hot new Nashville restaurants were. It was the double bonus of sitting near the newspaper’s food critic, gossip columnist and music writers. Those people know everything. These days I am more suburban soccer mom than reporter-on-the-spot and I don’t get out much to places when they make the [...]

In the last week, I have dunked myself in the Harpeth River, taken a jon boat out on the lake at Montgomery Bell state park, and swum at the faux beach on the park’s lake. A few nights ago, my daughter stripped off all her clothes and danced in a torrent of cool summer rain. [...]

Have you heard the NPR series on Summer Sounds? Lawnmowers, beans in buckets, bull frogs. I love that series as much as I do Story Corps. Delicious. In my back woods, the summer sound is frogs in the pond. I have no idea what kind of frogs they are, but they’ve been with us for [...]

My husband tells me on the telephone, while I am 900-miles away in New Jersey, that hey, something got in the coop and got a bird. “Feathers everywhere,” he said. We were down to three guineas, from the original 12, plus two babies who hatched last July. (They’ve passed on with the help of cars [...]

I am not sure why I am surprised to find Spanish language goods in local stores. Maybe because when I was growing up, the Spanish seemed insulated to the Miami and North Jersey zips where I lived out a bilingual life. I think it was two years ago that I got all sentimental in the [...]

A post for Sundays in My City, an Unknown Mami regular feature. Visit her site to see other lovely spots around the globe. I love it because it encourages me to show you the wonder of Boonie Life. There’s a park not far from our home. It is where Maria crawled around in the grass [...]

Do you know that all I want to do these days is sit near a lazy Tennessee creek with this borrowed Boxer-mix puppy? Is she not heaven? The creek is a few miles from us and runs through the front property of a friend’s house — same friend whose house was flooded in May when [...]

A lot of people are sad and ticked the national media, and the country as a whole, doesn’t get the magnitude of what has happened here. Do you now know, I am curious? Did you see Anderson Cooper last week? Do you realize that an entire 52-county region flooded, that street after street after street [...]