You can take the girl out of Iowa, but good luck taking the Iowa out of the girl, especially when it comes to pig love.
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Remember the outhouse
Presidents can rage and rant against filthy interlopers but those who like what they hear would be wise to remember America's origins.
Sight at a loss for words
Vision metaphors are central to all aspects of speech, but they take for granted the precarious gift of seeing.
Musical drugs
What's available in Italy and what's not can be difficult even for a working doctor to track, since some drugs vanish only to reappear.
When soap was soup
The difference between chicken noodle and cleanliness once proved mystifying, even for pajamas.
The mind and the matter
Making holiday cookies and decorations, very much manual labor, can have significance deeper than the simple joy of their making.
Be my doctor
An Objective Structured Clinical Examination is medical school lingo for a very special kind of stress test.
The dress in the attic
A grandmother's dress, extracted from its sleepy attic domain, opens into a world of Italian family memories.
A new winter order
Moving from Milan to small town New Hampshire quickly alters your view of what Christmas, and winter, mean.
At the mosaic, turn left
It's 1980. You need to get an urgent message home to far-away America. Here's what to do.
In the beginning
When a New York doctor moved to Rome in the bleak days of 1978, it was the start of a really big adventure.
Unvarnished darkness
Anonymous confessions are not the answer when it comes to bringing abhorrent abuse to heel.