Focused at Fifty

Mom's Chicken Soup (Marc-style) On cold winter days, Mom used to make Tabatchnick's brand vegetable soup. It was a family favorite. I remember smelling it while is simmer on the stove as I sat in the breakfast room doing my homework. She served it with a crusty French loaf.  Other than that, I don't remember her making her own soup except for matzoh ball soup during the Jewish holidays. One day going through Mom's recipes, I was excited to come across a recipe for chicken soup that I did not know she had.  I had found my next recipe. This is a great basic chicken soup recipe which you can definitely change up or add to OR just make it 'as is' for some good Jewish penicillin! I had planned to make it for John and I on a recent Saturday afternoon. After getting all of my ingredients out (except the chicken of course), I laid down on the couch to watch an afternoon movie for about 30 minutes. I couldn't even tell you what movie it was because I promptly d

Dad, Mom, Adam, & Sheryl @ Kit Carson home in Taos, NM Summer 1981 I recently entered a writing contest and was asked to relate "travel" and my writing to the contest. It brought back memories of traveling with my family in the early '80s when we took several month long vacations across America each summer. My father was an art professor at a local college and he would have off from June till September.This left 3 months to do my mother's "honey do list", gardening, or planning our annual summer road trip. We would head west through Pennsylvania with our first stop being somewhere right across the border in Ohio. It never felt like we were on vacation until we traveled through the 300 plus miles of "Pennsee."    From there, we would continue either towards my grandparents' home in Pueblo, Colorado or our cousins' cattle ranch in South Dakota. Driving through miles and miles of the Midwest, I would rest my head on the car door ju