Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.