Arts & Culture

“When Margery was ten, she fell in love with a beetle....Close up, that small plain thing was not plain, not one bit. Oval in shape and gold all over, it was incandescent. “The golden beetle of New Caledonia,” said her father. “Imagine how it would be to find this one and bring it home.”

It seems like almost yesterday that George Frederick Bollinger led a contingent of North Carolinians across the Mississippi River into Missouri.  The young Mr. Bollinger had visited the small community of Cape Girardeau in 1797, established a friendship with Louis Lorimier who encouraged him to return to North Carolina and bring more settlers to the area.

Not long ago I made a sojourn to Lititz, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the American pretzel.  It's a town in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country not far from Philadelphia, another town that takes its pretzels seriously.

“Prologue: Flinders Island, Australia, 1840. By the time the rains came, Mathinna had been hiding in the bush for nearly two days. She was eight years old, and the most important thing she’d ever learned was how to disappear.”

It seems like almost yesterday that a meeting in a Farmington, Missouri coffee shop yielded a story about the theft of a doughnut from a local grocery store that made national news!