amber apple

At the beginning of 2025, I remember feeling restless in a way I couldn’t quite name.

“We can know only that we know nothing, and that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” — Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace Alright, kids.

“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.”

Few endeavors are as maddeningly precise, as whimsically delicate, as the French macaron.

Most of you know that I grew up Protestant — Southern Baptist, in fact — and I held, as many Protestants do, a certain cautious distance toward the Catholic Church.