August 14, 2024

At the very leading edge of the Great Recession, my partner/husband Bob and I were on a food tour of Chinatown, San Francisco (not yet called Asiantown). As I watched a big tray full of live frogs climbing over each other while the shop owner angrily waved me and my camera away, my cell phone rang.

It was a new client of our welcome service that had begged us to pay a year in advance. He flatly told us that he wanted to back out and would we please send back all his year’s payments that we were spending at the moment.

By the time we arrived back home after enjoying SanFran, Sausalito, the complete wine country experience, and the north coast of California, the full-blown recession had launched, and we lost forty percent of our customers over the next ten days. We, as a small business work with other small businesses, all of us quickly realizing our enterprises had come to a dead halt, thanks to Bear Stearns and all the big players who had been overly enjoying American citizens’ trust in their housing investments (and making the same kind of stupid decisions themselves with the help of their bankers’ gratuitousness.

I got through those years by starting a gratitude journal, in which I forced myself to commit to writing every single morning five things for which I felt gratitude. Some days there were slim pickings — my tooth didn’t hurt, etc. We had a lovely home in Chadds Ford, a great sailboat on the Chesapeake that we held onto in case we lost the house and our retirement savings that we spent over ten years to stay afloat. We made it, and I’d like to think we helped many of our businesses to do the same.

Today I feel gratitude of a different kind. I have been honored and pleased to be invited to be a monthly column writer for Chadds Ford Live, our local weekly e-newspaper that began after the Chadds Ford Post closed, and then went online in 2009. Bob and I have known Rich Schwartzman, our editor, and Emily Myers, founder, for all those years through our interest in our community and for me, as the founding Chair of the Chadds Ford Open Space Committee. Emily and we had tried several times to consider a partnership—but we were both too busy running our respective operations. Recently we got to meet George Rotsch (who is now working with Rich to grow CFL as it’s been acquired by the owners of DelawareLIVE after our loss of Emily to Colorado and her children and grandchildren—our loss, her/their gain, for sure).

My approach to this column will, in many ways, be as down-home and friendly as Sally Denk Hooey’s is in her “Along the Ford” column. I have not met her but greatly enjoy her style and her approach to localness. And now I feel sure I will meet her. And that’s kind of what I’m about.

I love meeting people and sharing ideas about food, gardens, writing, birding, world affairs, and travel. I also love watercolor painting and have had the privilege of learning from our own great Karl Keurner, but I have taken a temporary hiatus to focus on writing. I’ve published a book into which I invested 20 years of my limited time that space doesn’t permit me to describe, but this link does: read about my book and buy it. Yes, this comes under the category of “shameless self-promotion,” but I’m learning it should be part of the deal. You don’t have to buy it, of course, but if you’re curious after reading a bit about it, you might enjoy it.

I’ll do my best to avoid politics, religion, school board talk, and other topics that get us right into the weeds. But I do hope to elicit your comments and thoughts (presented in a most civil way) in the Comments section where you now do not have to be subscribed to comment — meaning no password entry, the very bane of our existence — thank you, Bill Gates, who was supposed to have this fixed by now and has said it was the worst mistake he’s ever made in his life.

Looking forward to chatting with you,