I thought I'd share the words written last week by Angelina Cicero, the dedicated English teacher who taught three of my four sons:

How many roads must a black man walk down, before you call him a man?

#BlackLivesMatter

If you are white and you have a fear of black men, it is not because the black man is dangerous but because you have not eaten beside him, worshipped beside him, talked with him of his dreams, held his babies, seen him look into the eyes of his wife, listened to his stories, read his history. Why have you not? Why have you accepted a segregated life? Why have you allowed this world to indoctrinate you into seeing him as the "other"? Such abstinence from the full human community is neglect. Willful ignorance. Dangerous.

If fear lives in you, canceling compassion, erasing his humanity, causing you to view him as expendable, his neck as a place to hang or crush him, his body a something you may maim or shoot, and him unworthy of kindness, you must examine why you have excused yourself from a fundamentally human act: to perceive that black lives matter. To perceive that you are the one whom people fear for a reason, not him.

While nothing can or should distract us from doing our part to fight the injustice and brutality faced by so many of our fellow human beings, my procrastination links are here, as they always are, if you need a bit of a respite…

• Doris Day's house and contents in Carmel, California were auctioned off recently. Here's a peek. It pretty much looks exactly as cheerful as you would expect.

• A fun rundown of chance encounters on the street that impacted the course of our cultural history.

• I’ll admit I do a shorter version of this before dinner at the farm. My husband says I’m like the mom in Swiss Family Robinson, trying to retain some of the traditions from our old life.

• Sure hope you don't hit a paywall on this advice column from the always wise Carolyn Hax who defends a woman's collection of books.

• Petra Kaksonen, my Alt Summit roomie, just launched a textile collection that is the essence of Scandinavian chic. That backpack!

• This cottage, originally constructed by the local swimmers, has apparently been rebuilt six or seven times after getting washed away by the river. Would you stay here?

• This made me laugh. Will it make my millennial kids laugh? I'm sure I'll find out. 

• Many of you readers have become my pen pals. Marjorie is one of the original. Last week she wrote this to me: "If just a small section of the glasshouse near my quarters could be done in this style? Oprah says: Everyone stars in his / her own movie. My scenes at the farm are captioned: The Princess arrived to work on Screenplay & forgot to leave. Script Notes: I am fair. Sunburn easily even with a 110 SpF zinc based sunscreen, so that hammock really could use a shadier spot. 

Photo by Aleksandr Ledogorov via Unsplash.