This is what I want you to do: tell someone you love them, and dinner's at six. That's the tagline from one of my favorite memoirs on food and entertaining, Bread and Wine, by Shauna Neiquist and this, I believe, is where the good stuff is found. In 2011, I went to visit my grandma in California for the last time. Each morning I’d drive to the hospital, and then each afternoon, I’d walk back out into the parking lot—the one with the little rose garden--and all I ever wanted to do after a day spent there, with its beeping machines gray hospital beds, and smells of plastic, was to gather friends around a big table and pass heaping bowls of food. To eat and drink and laugh into the fading evening light and celebrate—well, nothing more than simply being alive. In fact, it’s the first thing I did when I got home. A call went out to friends, and just like that we were on my deck back in Colorado, filling glasses of wine and eating grilled salmon with lemons and arugula and parmesan s...
Sharing our Journeys to Give Strength to Others