I recently traveled to Mexico City to spend the holidays with my son and his wife who are currently living there. No trip to Mexico City is complete without a visit to Casa Azul in Coyoacan, which was the home of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), who has long been one of my favorite artists. I love the very intimate nature of Kahlo’s paintings which are often self-portraits, done in a wonderfully magical style. Although her paintings are quite dreamlike, Frida stated, “I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” I also admire Kahlo for the way she lived her life with abandon, despite the ever-present pain she was in and the many operations she endured throughout her life after surviving a catastrophic bus accident when she was a teenager. My trip inspired me to put together a list of books about Frida Kahlo that are in the youth collection at the Whitefish Bay Public Library.

I have always loved cemeteries. As a child, I studied the gravestones in the cemetery surrounding our church to learn as much as I could about the lives of the people who came before me. In college, I sought out a cemetery near my school as it was a quiet place to study on warm days. For a break, I often wandered around admiring the sculptures that adorned the graves. To this day, whenever I travel to a new place, I always try to include a cemetery or two on my itinerary.

The 811 area of non-fiction, where the poetry books are shelved, is a peaceful place. This seems fitting to me as I seek out poetry when I feel unsettled and want to read words that will help ground me and offer me a new way of thinking about and looking at things. As poetry critic Stephen Burt said in his 2013 TED talk Why People Need Poetry, “Poems can help you say, help you show how you’re feeling, but they can also introduce you to feelings, [to] ways of being in the world, [to] people, very much unlike you, maybe even people from long, long ago.”

Humans have practiced beekeeping since the time of the ancient Egyptians over 4,000 years ago. Bees have recently been threatened by “colony collapse disorder” in which the worker bees inexplicably abandon the hive, leaving behind the queen and the larvae. In response to this, urban beekeeping has become more prevalent. Today, beehives can be found on the roofs of buildings in cities all over the world. Here are some books for both adults and children, fiction and non-fiction, that will have you buzzing!

We all engage in rituals, large and small. The smallest rituals (making our bed) help us organize our days. The larger ones help us make sense of our world. By engaging in the same ritual as our loved ones who are far away, or by repeating a ritual through the generations, we can feel a connection to loved ones who are elsewhere, and to those who have come before us.