When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
While South Dakota may not be a place associated with Spring Break, that is where my best friend, Mary, and I found ourselves last week for a whirlwind couple of days in the Black Hills and the Badlands. And even though it was freezing—and let me tell you, it was freezing—it was an unforgettable experience.
Read MoreThomas Jefferson wrote in his autobiography, "So ask the travelled inhabitant of any nation, In what country on earth would you rather live?—Certainly in my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest & sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? France."
Read MoreI've been on ten flights in the past year—a mixture of international and continental, large airlines and budget airlines, small planes and airbuses. Around the fifth flight, I began to notice patterns in the people sitting around me, and so, like the good writer I am, I started to people watch. And I realized, though the specifics changed, many of the fellow travelers I saw on these flights could be cookie-cutter replicas of one another. These are the five types of flyers I noticed most frequently:
Read MoreLocated in Frankfort, Kentucky, the mid-point between the much larger cities of Lexington and Louisville, Buffalo Trace Distillery looks dingy in the gray light of December. This can be attributed to the black fungus clinging to the trees and buildings—a fungus almost entirely unique to distilleries. The "angel's share," bourbon that evaporates from the barrels during the aging process, serves as a food source for the fungus and allows it to thrive.
Read MoreThis past Friday was my last day with my first class of Composition kiddos! As a Kentuckian in the north, where knowledge of Kentucky is severely lacking, one of my favorite classroom activities this semester was discussing the merits of Kentucky vs. Minnesota. I often found myself having to explain things that I thought were common knowledge (like lakes not freezing all the way through, even during the winter or, more importantly, sentence diagramming), and they taught me all about the strange things Minnesotans do and say to keep themselves sane in the frigid north. So here are some of the weirdest things I learned about Minnesota from my students:
Read MoreEach year, the end of the semester and beginning of the Christmas season brings three things: an insatiable desire to travel after barricading myself in my apartment to finish final projects, beautiful Instagram posts of festive-Europe, and Facebook advertisements for discount plane tickets. It's a perfect storm of stir-crazy and wanderlust that compels me to research trips that I know I won't have time to take or the money to afford. So instead, let's reminisce with a tale from a 2016 European adventure with my fiancé, Ryan. This is the story of the chocolate chickens that saved us
Read MoreBecause I'm a biology nerd who loves animals, I love going on "dates" to the zoo or aquarium. One of my all-time favorite memories of my semester abroad in Europe was a wintry visit to the Dortmund Zoo in Germany with Ryan, and that zoo earned my top spot for its South American giant otter exhibit and a free-ranging sloth. Now that Ryan and I are long distance once again, we needed to make a tradition out of our off-season zoo trip and check out the nearest one in my new locale: the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley, MN.
Read MoreIf you know me (or if you've taken a look around this blog), you know I love Kentucky. I love fall in Kentucky and going to pumpkin patches, picking apples from the orchard, and having evening bonfires. But ever since I first spent time in the north during the fall of my senior year of high school (we went on a college visit to Vermont), I've been enamored by autumn up north and everything that comes with it: the chilly temperatures, the vivid reds, oranges, and yellows of the trees, the morning mist and gray skies. So how could I pass up an opportunity to see one of my best friends and witness the height of the fall season in a lakeside vacation town?
Read MoreI'm the type of person who can't remember the lyrics to a song I heard five minutes before. Unless it's "All Star" by Smashmouth, chances are I don't know the lyrics. But then, I saw Lin-Manuel Miranda's Saturday Night Live monologue last year, and I was hooked. The monologue was based on "My Shot" from Miranda's musical, Hamilton, which is based on the American Revolution and the politics of early America. So, of course, I listened to the real version of the song. And then the rest of the musical.
Read MoreSo I've been living in Minnesota for an entire month now! And let me tell you, I've been a fish out of water. From the lack of normal grocery stores, to the accents, to the prairies, moving away from Kentucky has been quite a lifestyle change. Here are five serious (or not so serious) observations about living closer to the Great White North than the Bluegrass State.
Read MoreWe emerged at the end of that hellish night as changed individuals. We had experienced things no human being should ever have to. We had seen the eternal abyss and survived.
Read MoreWe arrived, bedraggled and with spirits dangerously low, to London Victoria around 7 a.m. after our near-eternal ride on the Night Bus from Hell. After getting as far away from our fellow passengers as quickly as possible, we got our bearings and headed for the nearest underground station so that we could drop off our bags at the hostel.
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