About Etta M.
I came for the house. I stayed for the light in the afternoon.
In 2021 I left a marketing job I was good at and did not like, and bought a narrow white house on Morrow Lane with a bad roof, a wood stove, and forty feet of overgrown backyard. I had never grown anything. I had never baked anything that did not come from a box. The first winter was a disaster and I have been writing about it ever since.
I am not a chef and not a farmer. I am one person with two raised beds, a forty year old oven, and a library card. Everything here is something I actually did in the week I wrote about it, including the parts that did not work.
What to expect
Four promises, none of them exciting.
One post a week
Thursday mornings, most weeks. Sometimes I miss one. I would rather skip a week than post something I do not mean.
Recipes you can follow
Weights where they matter, a note about what usually goes wrong, and no life story ahead of the ingredients.
No ads, no sponsors
Nothing here is paid for. If I mention a tool or a book it is because I own it and use it, not because somebody sent it.
Comments off, mail open
There is no comment section. There is an email address, and I read everything that comes to it.
The town
Ashgrove, population not very many.
Twenty minutes from a highway, ninety from anything you would call a city, and about four hundred feet above a river nobody outside the county has heard of.
One stoplight, a library that punches far above its weight, a feed store that sells excellent coffee by accident, and a ridge trail nine miles east that almost nobody uses. The posts filed under Town are about this place and the ones near it: Bell Creek, Fairmount, Pike Hollow. If you live around here, some of it will be familiar. If you do not, I hope it reads like somewhere you would like to spend an afternoon.
- New posts
- Thursday mornings
- Replies to notes
- Usually within a week
- Posts so far
- 6 and counting
- Writing here since
- 2021
A note for whoever owns this site
Etta M. is invented and so is Ashgrove. Every word on this page is placeholder writing meant to show the shape of an about page. Replace it with your own story, your own town and your own photos, then delete this box.