There comes a point in one’s life when you mature from storing wine in cardboard boxes in your basement or built in lattice shelving in your kitchen to finally buying a fancy wine fridge. Now that’s adult-ing. My husband, The Rum Drinker, and I bought our first wine cooler several years after we built our forever home. (It was our third home and that was five homes ago…but I digress.)

Halloween was always my son’s favorite holiday. Our front yard would turn into a gruesome graveyard with bloody headstones and life size skeletons throughout the leaf-covered yard and gardens.  Bloody handprints smeared on our front door greeted our trick or treaters as a talking skeleton dropped an eyeball and questioned their courage in a creepy voice. It was awesome!

I’m retired, so my wine is poured at 5 pm sharp. I’ll wait for you to kick off your shoes, pop open your preference and get comfortable. Don’t forget, your cork will be listening... 

I spend a lot of my daytime hours writing, reading and/or researching for my writing. I start in the morning, after an online yoga or barre class, when my brain cells are at their freshest. A few diet cokes and left-overs for lunch easily get me through to around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. I wrap it up then if I have a previously scheduled appointment or errand to run. If I have neither, I continue on until 5 pm. (My wine time is the carrot on the stick that gets me through those last two hours!)

Polly P, Bunny (their real-ish names, I swear) and I used to live near each other in a gated community that had three separate sets of fairways and greens to play on, two different restaurants to feed from and several watering holes--some for the families with young ones, some adult only. It offered walking trails and group exercise...no, it wasn’t a zoo...it was a country club.

2020 called for ingenuity when it came to creating festivities with the folks you had been staring at every day 24/7. So, with only The Rum Drinker and I at home, we needed something to enlighten our isolation. We began crafting an adult tea party of sorts- a new cheese, a new wine, each Friday. We set up individual charcuterie boards and discovered new combinations of meats, cheese, fruits, vegetables, and preserves atop a variety of bread and crackers. All this led to my researching and sampling wine and cheese combos. Here are my top picks (Mind you, I am no connoisseur of either!)

There are tons of wine opener choices. Corkscrews come in a variety of styles, from traditional to novelty, and have been around since the 1700s.

When I lived in New England, autumn was my favorite time of year. Actually, The fall is my favorite time of year no matter where I am, but it’s especially nice in New England. The air is crisp, the county fair is up and running and it’s apple-picking time!

“Forced Family Fun” is what my siblings and I have called the last two weeks of July for the past 25 years. The five of us, most of our spouses, our kids, and now grandkids are forced onto the beaches of Nantucket for two weeks every July (Insert sad face emoji).