March 2021 There’s an expression I grew up with in Brooklyn. Whenever something happened that seemed like a surprise, my mom or grandmother, or any Jewish person I knew of a certain age would shrug, and say, “Oy, Who knew?” Recently, I stopped into a local jeweler to have a guard put on a ring I had gifted my son during the holidays. While I patiently waited as the jeweler adjusted the ring in the back, I sat and looked around the shop. It was an eclectic decor, similar to so

Now that Hallmark February is upon us, (and since this past December and January were quite literally terrorizing) I’d like to take a moment and turn my internal focus on love. Not necessarily the kind of love between two people, family or pets. I’m thinking about love of place, of home, of the place one calls home. I recently learned there is an actual word for love of a place: topophilia. The word was popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in 1974 as “the human being’s af