LATEST POSTS
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Goose Bumps
When I was little, we raised chickens for eggs and meat and they had a rather generous sized coop with a large run in the field behind our house. My best friend and I would spend hours back there in the summer playing with the chickens and bringing them all the tomato worms we found
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Oysters
Oysters are part of our culinary history and culture in St. Mary’s as evidenced by our annual oyster festival. The festival, now known as the U.S. Oyster Festival, occurs every year on the third weekend in October and has been featured on the Food Network. They have an oyster shucking contest that brings competition from
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Dark Woods, Dark Water
In my dream, at the end of a winding path, mostly downhill and strewn with loose rocks, was a pond. Both the path leading down to it and the pond itself were surrounded by trees; maples and oaks and the occasional pine. They were spaced far enough apart that you could see the trees behind
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Crabs
I grew up in Southern Maryland, St. Mary’s County to be exact. This is important because it is surrounded by rivers, creeks, and small bays, all tributaries off the Chesapeake bay and when I was growing up, you could pretty much toss a chicken neck into any body of water and catch enough crabs to
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The Dunes
If you traveled in the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the 1980’s, long before it became a popular tourist spot, there was very little between the small outpost towns of Corolla, Duck, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and Nags Head. This long stretch of islands and narrow lands was simply a brushstroke on the
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The Scent of Boxwoods
American boxwoods have a distinctive scent that throws me back to childhood, growing up in Southern Maryland. Boxwoods don’t have much of an aroma in the winter, unless you break the branches, but when the sun hits their leaves and warms the oils within, you get the musty and slightly acrid scent of damp shadows
The Scent of Boxwoods 