Iceland, you say? Sweden? — Well, both might be slightly less crazy than the two countries I’ll get to in a minute . . . here’s a clue; one is led by an arrogant idiot with crazy blond hair, and the other was previously led by an arrogant idiot with crazy blond hair (dyed) and…

After a humiliating French language class in a room full of teenagers, I realised France wasn’t the only foreign country I was living in. I had also arrived in the Country of Old Age. I didn’t want to be there. I’d like to say I quickly snapped out of the…

I was approaching seventy (gingerly, feet dragging, denying, denying) when I decided to move from California where I’d been living to a French village. Alone. I knew no one in France and barely spoke the language. My decision caused a few raised eyebrows. Won’t you be lonely? Homesick? Miss your…

Montpellier, France. If age is a state of mind, the state of mine that morning was exultant. I’d recently turned 70 and been asked out by a man who guessed we were about the same age. He was fifty-five. The glow lingered as I ran to catch the tram to…

Either way, does anyone really care? As of 2022 Medium has over 54 million registered users —-people who have created a Medium account. Since Medium was launched in 2017, 200,000 writers have enrolled in the program. Since August 2021, 161 million visitors have used the Medium website. Statistics according to…

But history and winemaking tradition in these parts goes back much further. — Perhaps it was a sense of history and tradition that persuaded the Faugères wine confrerie — members of the Faugères Brotherhood of Bacchus to don heavy tapestry robes and pouffy gold velvet hats on a summer afternoon when temperatures were somewhere between sizzling and incendiary. But then Bacchus was the…

Then accidentally deleted it. . . UPDATE Medium restored the link!!! Story republished, sans notes. — I’m ready to tear my hair out. . . I published the story, sent it to e-mail subscribers, submitted it to @Modern Woman then discovered I’d left all my rough notes — including some diary entries I absolutely didn’t want the rest of the world to see at the bottom…