Saturday Stories

Wiepie (VEE-pee) is an old Dutch name, so old it’s hardly used in the Netherlands anymore. The full version is Wybrigje. The meaning: courage and bravery, used in the language of war. The name suits Wiepie Cross, though you wouldn’t necessarily know that from talking to her. She is modest: warm, direct, and unhurried. But…

The air outside was a bitter -30°F, the kind of cold that bites deep into the bone. But inside a small, one-room apartment in Mongolia, Bethany breathed in the humid, heavy scent of damp earth and green leaves.

She had filled a 12-foot windowsill with every houseplant she could find, running a humidifier constantly to mimic the tropics in the middle of the steppe.

In a quiet corner of Madison, Wisconsin, tucked between the city’s vibrant pulse and a tranquil lake, Wendy Porterfield is proving that you don’t need a hundred-acre ranch to live a life of abundance.

CeAnne Kosel didn’t grow up with herbs. She didn’t grow up with a garden. She grew up on three acres that had been someone else’s personal golf course, which her dad promptly tore up to build the family home.

The golf course might have been removed, but the grass remained more or less a green carpet: CeAnne’s primary relationship with the land was sitting on a riding lawnmower every summer.

There is a community in Vermont, on an island in a lake, that makes soap. They are unusual even by Vermont standards, which is saying something.

Darrell Hanson is a practical guy… so practical that he has already picked out his burial plot. He’s been thinking about the headstone inscription, too. Something short. He landed on He Tried – because if there’s one thing that’s been true his whole life, it’s that. He tried things that worked. (Lots.) He tried things that didn’t….