"I love specialty equipment, but the only thing that can make a picnic terrible is not being able to get rid of dirty things". When gathering once a month with friends to picnic, she finds that the most commonly forgotten items tend to be trash bags, serving spoons and a sharp knife.
On Thursdays, the eve of the sabbath, the Cheshti Sufi people of Afghanistan, Islamic mystics, are gathering once again for the ritual that the Taliban so long denied them.
And in Kabul, where I was last week, doing some research, the talk of potential coups d'etat is gathering once again as well.
We have lost the art of gathering as women once did, to connect, to nurture each other and to actually give space, time, energy and permission for the feminine to rise within us individually and collectively.
But as Sir Francis Bacon, who was among the first to understand the importance of gathering data in science, once observed, knowledge is power.
It was the kind of gathering that would have once included Ron Galotti, who seems to have counted himself a friend of the bride and was present when the couple first met at the Talk launch party in 1999.
The place of gathering and learning through workshops and performances was created by restoration of once abandoned school, as a part of the MDG-F Programme Culture for Development.
Once the law was passed, Peck said, the state began the laborious process of gathering two decades of files from county courthouses.
One of the tiny number of African American delegates at this gathering of what once was the Party of Lincoln says that black delegates were "shoved, pushed, spat upon, and cursed with a liberal sprinkling of racial epithets".
The Endless Column, an artistic and engineering tour de force, was dedicated as the clouds of war were once more gathering over Europe, in 1938.
