1967 was an important year for Chadds Ford. Andy Wyeth and Frolic Weymouth, along with some very amazing people founded the Brandywine River Museum. And just down the road that same year, Andy and four other friends, founded the Sanderson Museum. In the rest of the world, President Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war in a tiny country called Vietnam; we played music on large…
Some who have lived in Chadds Ford for more than 30 years will remember the name John Darwin Dorst with a knot in your stomach. If you don’t, read on. His name and a wave of sadness came over me when I read this year’s Chadds Ford Days may have been the last one as we knew it; one more piece of Chadds Ford gone.…
The concert of the Kennett Symphony Orchestra at Longwood Gardens on Sunday evening, April 2 was more than a concert. It was a festival for the ears, eyes, nose and soul as well, the perfect experience to bring one out of the doldrums of winter. The evening’s experience started as the audience was invited to walk to the conservatory in the warm colors of a…
Orchestral music wasn’t meant to be played in giant concert halls.We weren’t meant to see it from a distance of 200 feet from the last balcony, peering at tiny musicians through opera glasses and hearing amplified music through giant speakers. Just as one views a sculpting or a fine oil painting in a museum, music is personal, it is intimate. It is meant to be…
Ever seen the commercial where the guy is dressed in lederhosen and dancing the Schuhplatten? Thought he was German, took the Ancestry.com DNA test, found out he was mostly Scottish and now wears a kilt. I started charting my family tree in ninth grade by talking with my grandparents, reading old family Bibles as well as funeral sermons. I mean, how could this dufus get…
Hygge! No, it’s not a typo or some Klingon greeting, but: -It’s something that will come in very handy in the next two or three months; -You can do it with your friends, with your significant other or even by yourself; -The English language doesn’t even have a translation for it; -And while Brexit was the trending word in 2016, hygge was the runner up…
It’s official. Mark the date. My husband and I are fossils, dinosaurs. I’m not sure when it happened, but it came as a painful shock last week. On Halloween day, Tom went out and bought himself a new car. A 2016, AWD, black, GMC Terrain. He had been thinking about it for a long time. I was waiting at the door when he brought…
I’m going to make a bold statement that’s downright un-American. Here goes… I don’t like football and didn’t watch the Super Bowl. There, I said it. But even I will concede interest in that other competition. You know, the one to create commercials that for some bizarre reason tell you absolutely nothing about the product. Budweiser had their usual Hallmark-esque offering. This year’s featured their…
Last Friday morning, I sat down at my computer and opened an email from Chuck Ulmann, Collections Curator at the Sanderson Museum. The news, while not unexpected, hit like a Mack Truck. “I received a call from Bruce, Tom's son. Tom passed away peacefully last night about 7 p.m.” Until Thursday, Thomas R. Thompson, was the last of the 5 founding members of the Sanderson…
There’s something from the Brandywine Ace Hardware in Pocopson on the Mimram Brücke (bridge) over the Rhine River in Germany. Honest. And I’m sure they don’t even know it’s there. Two summers ago when my husband and I were strolling along a pedestrian bridge over the Salz River in Salzburg, Austria, we were introduced to “Love Locks.” There on both sides of the bridge were multiple…
When Chadds Ford psychologist Kayta Curzie Gajdos has something to say, she says it brilliantly like the cover of her new book, – a nighttime volcanic eruption Why the erupting volcano on the cover? That seemed to be the question of the evening at the release of her new book, “Quiet Wisdom in Loud Times – The Rise of the Wounded Feminine” at the Chester…