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What's blooming in southern California

I just spent 12 days in the desert just north of Palm Springs. The lemon trees were blossoming and producing fruit at the same time. Every day, I visited the bees there. We made scrumptious lemon bars and lemonade from the fruit.

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Le Collège Cévenol, Part 2

Here I am standing in front of the old Internat des Filles (girls' dormitory) at the Collège. This was the site of many dramas which can only be created by 12–14 year old girls .... It was a difficult time for me. Right now I am focusing on remembering the good parts: learning French; the food, which for a boarding school was very good; walking down the hill to the village; studying and doing well in school; the walks in the surrounding forest... Diary, 20 October 1964 I love Goûter [afternoon tea]... Hot tea, bread, chocolate ... Diary entry, 8 February 1965 This week [my marks are] History, 16; 20, Maths; Grammar 18 ... This means History 80%, Math 100, Grammar 90 ... We managed to get inside the building; it was open because construction workers were working behind the building, luckily not in the wing where I lived. However, the place was a shambles inside. What remains of one of the bedrooms. We saw evidence of workers probably living in some of the be...

Le Collège Cévenol, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Haute-Loire, France

At the age of twelve, I graduated from eighth grade two years early. My mother felt that I was too young for high school. When she met Richard Unsworth, chaplain at Smith College, who was involved with the American Friends of the Collège Cévenol, an international school in the Cevennes mountains of France, she thought that perhaps this would be a good place for me for a "gap year" (we didn't call it a gap year then -- that's a recent expression). My father was very reluctant to have me go away at such a young age, but in the end he gave his ok to the prospect. I arrived at the Collège in the fall of 1964 at the age of twelve, and spent the next 8 months there. The school was in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small town on the Vivarais-Lignon plateau in the Massif Central , the central mountains (Cevennes) in southeastern France. Click here for map of Le Chambon. Last Wednesday, I returned to Le Chambon after fifty-five years. We parked in town and walked about 1.5 kil...

400 Years of Gravestones

Yesterday I drove up to Glenmavis, just outside of Airdrie (east of Glasgow), to the New Monkland Parish church. This is the church where great-great-grandparents Helen Hastie and Thomas Beveridge were married. A very kind church elder showed me a book of the church history, made copies of a few pages, and helped me to ascertain that in fact this is where the marriage took place. The building sits high on a hill right at an intersection, made of stone and very plain on the outside, and surrounded right up to the church walls and door (as churches are here) with gravestones. This is a huge cemetery. Inside the church it is all dark wood and warm. I took a couple of photos. Click here for a photo of the interior. (You have to click on Today up top once you get to the home page. Then scroll down to below the photo of the elders.) It was powerful to stand where our ancestors joined together to start a life together, just before they set sail for America to start another sort of new life. ...

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