I don’t care for art which snooty people can point to and say something along the lines of “This represents the zeitgeist for transcendentalism among bohemian basket weavers during the Westward Expansion era.” I much prefer art depicting pheasants, horses or German Shepherds, as I can point to it and identify it and be correct every time.
Hirsch Florist
“I like flowers.”
– Elton John (when asked by the British High Court why he recently spent $400,000 on flowers)
Flowers are the original gift. Long before we became clever enough to cut diamonds or bake cookies or write love songs, people recognized the perfect beauty of delicate little flowers and gave them to whomever they held dearest.
3Be Meats
3Be Meats’ name alone tells you what the owners are in it for. When Tony Anderson and Mack Ternes established the Bismarck-Mandan area’s butcher shop in 2017, they could only think to name it after their own kids: Tony’s Bentley, Bea and Brimley, and Mack’s Eliza.
Butter Creations by Anne
Hawley, Minnesota: the land of milk and honey. Butter and honey, to be more precise, as well as cream, sugar, blueberries, raspberries, bilberries, boysenberries, and just recently prickly pears. For Hawley is the home of Butter Creations by Anne, whose honey butter is no less delicious than Olympian nectar.
The Maltese Cross Cabin
You can visit plenty of places where presidents were born – but only one where a president started life over again.
A large black cross scars the page for February 14 in Theodore Roosevelt’s diary for the year 1884. On that day, the young New York State legislator lost both his mother and his wife, Alice, the latter to a kidney ailment just one day after the birth of the couple’s daughter. Beneath the cross Roosevelt wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”
Duchessa Gelato
Corne and Conny van Bedaf’s ambition couldn’t fit in the Netherlands. The Dutch couple wanted a larger dairy farm, but so small and densely packed a country offers little real estate for cattle. You cannot let Holsteins graze on the canals of Amsterdam, after all. They would block boat traffic.