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Mentors and Role Models

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Yesterday was All Saints’ Day, a day when we honor  not only the official saints but also  some of the personal saints who shaped our lives. We learn from our mentors and role models and pass what we learn on to those whom we become mentors and role models.  For women, mothers offer both mentoring and a role model, one which we may choose to embrace in part or all or reject.  In my transition generation, rejecting in part if not totally the traditional model was more often the norm than the exception. That left us to search for other role models and later mentors. Role models are examples of what is possible.  Mentors are dispensers of advice and wisdom.

One mentor for me and my sister was our Aunt Marion, who was married but childless and very drawn to her brother’s abandoned children.  She was also a close friend of my mother, but she lived in a different, less domestic world, one of arts and intellect and social engagement. Another was my high school Latin teacher, a strict and demanding woman who was a mentor in my intellectual life and a role model in teaching. Being a voracious reader, I found my other role models in the female creations of Lucy Muad Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott, Anne of Green Gables and Jo March. (I especially like Anne who, like me, had a silent e added to her name.)

Becoming an academic economist means being part of a small gender minority, so many of my professional mentors were men.  I still smile when I recall my welcome to the Economics Department at Clemson by my department head, Harvey Wheeler.  He said, well, there are six of us men and you are the only woman.  I said that was fine.  Then he went on to say that my pending Ph.D., was from a northern university, and all of them had their graduate degrees from  southern universities.  I was a Yankee, they were southerners. I was a liberal, they were conservative.  He paused, and I wondered where this was going.  Finally, he said “You know, if you were just black, you’d be perfect!” I was relieved that he not only acknowledged but also celebrated the many minorities I brought to the table.

Two women who stand out from my graduate student days were both mentors and role models, Dorothy Goodwin and Audrey Beck. Dr. Goodwin specialized in state and local public finance, a field to which I was very much drawn.  Unable to choose between international economics and public finance, I wrote a dissertation that combined them: Sales Tax Harmonization in the European Economic Community. While I taught international economics some 40 times, it was federalism and state and local public finance that was at the core of my research and policy work.

Audrey, an economics instructor with a master’s degree, introduced me to the League of Women Voters, and inspired me tor organize a League in Clemson six years later. (I was also inspired by my mother telling me that her grandmother had marched for “Women’s suffrage.) Both Goodwin and Beck subsequently served in the Connecticut legislature. Audrey connected me with League leaders at the state level in South Carolina, who taught me how to advocate effectively in a not always welcoming political environment.  Sarah Leverette, Keller Barron, and Lynn Teague were especially important in shaping my public policy work and my organizational leadership skills. With their encouragement, I served two two-year terms as the Co-president of the League of Women Voters of South Carolina.

As we reflect on our heritage from personal mentors (or personal saints) In this month of celebrating women’s history, I invite you-all but especially women to reflect on who your mentors and role models have been, same gender or not.  And consider whom you may  have served as a role model and/or mentor, which can be one of the joys of our later years.  Mentors and role models form links between earlier generations and those yet to come.  We need each other.

About the Pledge of Allegiance…

~ purplesage41 ~ 4 Comments

Did you ever stop to think what you were saying when you and your elementary school classmates or your Rotary club recited the pledge of allegiance?  My problems started with the first line.  First, since we said it  as a group, why does it begin with I and instead of we?  And what is this allegiance thing?  I vaguely recall from movies about ancient heroes who served their liege Lord (the mortal one, not God) and owed him some highly specific duties and he in turn would offer them protection, employment and some of the necessities of life. According to Wikipedia, allegiance  is “the formal or deep obligation of fidelity owed by a citizen to a state, a vassal to a lord, or a person to a belief.”  Pretty complicated idea for the average second grader!

But why don’t we just pledge our allegiance, or loyalty,  to the country rather than sticking the flag in there! Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lovely flag with a great history from Betsy Ross to the Star Spangled Banner and beyond.  That pledge didn’t’ seem remotely related to the flag, or the country for which it stands.  I’m pretty sure my liege lord, if I had one, would have wanted me to pledge it to him directly and not to a flag. In any case, it’s a pretty dated idea for a democracy where we owe our loyalty to one another collectively, We are a nation of people that are all tied together.

l have several other quarrels with this mandatory exercise for our school children.  I would have objected in 1954 when it was slid into the text, but I was just 13 and not paying close attention.  I did and do believe in God , but I also believe in the first amendment. And the God I believe in may be very different from yours. One nation, indivisible?  Hardly a factual description, more like an aspiration.  Likewise, the noble but not yet achieved aspiration of   liberty and justice for all.

So what should we be saying? I believe that we have a covenant with each other like the Mayflower Compact among the pilgrims (who, unlike the puritans, were big fans of religious democracy). Or the oath that officeholders from president all the way down to city councils take when they assume a public office.  Which leads me to my suggested alternative.

Our national covenant is in our Constitution. And it begins with a covenant, about why and how we are together as a people, a nation That covenant is the Preamble A few small adjustments to put it in the present tense would make it a fine replacement for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Here is the original Preamble:”We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

And here is my slightly edited version:

“We citizens of the United States, in order to be and become a more perfect union, ensure justice, encourage domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and maintain the blessings of liberty  for ourselves and our posterity, do pledge our allegiance to the Constitution for the United States of America.”

I would be happy to approve and promote that version anytime, anywhere.  How about you?

Editorial suggestions are encouraged.

Holley Ulbrich November 2, 2026

Leave My Clock Alone!

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When Congress resumes, they will have a great many weighty issues to discuss.  I invite them, and you as their constituents, to take a break from the weight of the world and grapple instead with a seemingly simple problem—Daylight Saving Time. Sometime between bedtime and wake-up time Saturday night and Sunday morning we are instructed to turn our clocks back an hour. One hour of daylight will be subtracted from the early evening and revert to morning. People will be late for church. On Monday, school children may have a bit of sunlight when they meet the school bus.  Golfers will find their evening game curtailed. Supposedly DST saves energy, but the evidence is slim.

Fortunately, most of our clocks will be reset automatically, but I still have three clocks to reset in my kitchen, my bedroom and my car.  I do so under protest, because I don’t like confusing my body by messing with my biorhythms. Apparently that attitude is shared by a substantial majority of our fellow citizens. According to a NORC poll in 2025, 47% of the population oppose changing the clocks, while only 12% are in favor. The other 40% don’t really care.  A YouGov survey from 2026 found that 67% of us do not like the twice a year change, while only 19% thought it was a good idea. Ending the clock reset sounds like a slam dunk, a real people pleaser. 

But then comes the hitch.  The two polls registered 56% and 51% in favor of keeping  our clocks on Daylight Saving Time year-round instead of mid-March to November, while 42% and 43% preferred Eastern Standard Time.  Too close for comfort.  That’s just a little more than half who will be happy and a little less than half will be unhappy. School children will have a better shot at surviving to get on the bus, while golfers will resent no evening relaxation after a hard day’s work. The New England states, where it gets dark by 4:30 pm in the winter, are considering a switch to Atlantic time.  Northern states in general are more heavily impacted by the choice of DST or EST than Southern states, because their daylight is shorter,  so maybe they should have more say in the decision

What’s the answer? It calls for some creative thinking.  Perhaps school should start later, making school bus pickups safer.  Kids get a little more time to wake up before their first class. Or maybe employers, public and private, need to be more flexible about working hours.

There are no simple questions. If Congress can’t find a way out of the DST/EST challenge, how are they supposed to address the war in Iran, tariffs, the budget deficit, inflation, immigration, and the pending threat to the future of Social Security?

Aren’t you glad you didn’t run for Congress?

It’s Nobel Prize Week!

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

The week of October 6th is a nice change from elections and football games to honor the gifts of mind and soul. The world will honor five great minds and one great soul, or at least a great-souled organization and its leader.   Between October 6th and October 12th, six Nobel prizes will be awarded in Stockholm and Oslo. They honor outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, economics, and for work in peace. In a time of year when most of our attention to competition and success is focused on football, the Nobel Prizes are reminders of the value of other kinds of achievements and role models.

 Alfred Nobel was an inventor, scientist and businessman who also wrote poetry and drama. He is best known as the inventor of dynamite.  In 1895, he wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of these prizes.  The sixth prize, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was added in 1968.

With apologies to my non-South Carolina followers, I checked out the six awardees over the years with close ties to South Carolina, covering every category except literature. 

Charles Townes (Physics, 1964) was a native of Greenville. Townes shared the prize for his fundamental work in quantum electronics, which led to the invention of the laser.

 Joseph Goldstein (Medicine, 1985 )was born in Sumter and was in was awarded the prize for discoveries concerning cholesterol metabolism.

Kary Mullis (Chemistry, 1993) was born in North Carolina but grew up in Columbia. He won the prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction technique.

Robert Furchgott (Medicine, 1998) was born in  Charleston and was recognized for discoveries about the signaling role of nitric oxide in the cardiovascular system.

Benjamin Bernanke (Economic Sciences, 2022) was born in Georgia but grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, and received the prize for research on banks and financial crises, specifically the Great Depression. He was also chair of the Federa Reserve during the 2998 housing meltdown.He had to teach himself calculus to get into Harvard since it was not taught in Dillon County schools, and during his summers home from Boston he worked at the well-known stopping place on I95, South of the Border.

My last South Carolina honoree was born in Lamar. David Beasley, a Clemson University graduate, served as governor in 1995-99 where he presided over removing the Confederate flag from the top of the statehouse, thus losing a bid for a second term. Beasley went on to serve as executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme from2017 to 2023. He accepted the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the organization.

Looking for role models for your adolescents? Sports heroes and entertainers are fine, but so are people who achieve great things by working in their own way to make the world a better place! Share a Hero with someone during Nobel week.

Grandparents’ Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

Bet you didn’t know that there is a holiday in September called Grandparents’ Day. In the United States as well as some other countries. It falls on the first Saturday after Labor Day, which is September 13th this year. Not a big holiday–no parades, fireworks, or gifts.  It’s more of a family holiday where grandparents and grandchildren celebrate each other.

My late husband and I  were blessed with grandchildren (four), but I was shortchanged with grandparents.  My maternal grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1916, and his widow only lived to 55, dying before my parents were even married.  My paternal grandparents, who were divorced, had 12 grandchildren.  I seldom saw my grandmother. We had step-grands who didn’t take much interest in us, but we were close to my father’s father who had an apple orchard and a cider press and would try to stay connected with his oldest son’s  abandoned brood of three. A generation farther back, I lucked out–t with great-grandmothers

Ida Scoviille Hiewitt and Alice Muinger Stewart  are the great-grandmothers ones whose stories I will share on my weekly email missive to my daughters, niece, and nephew. I  knew my mother’s grandmother Alice and  my father’s grandmother Ida through stories told by my mother and my aunt. I will also honor in memory my own mother as a grandmother to my children.  What these three women had  in common was a genuine interest in young people and a willingness time to spend with them. 

My mother was close to her grandmother but also well acquainted with her grandmother-in-law, who raised my father when his parents separated. As a result, my mother had a huge fund of stories to share. Recounting family history through stories is a great gift from someone who knows the stories and can tell them well.  My mother told me many times how much I resembled both Alice and Ida in personality as well as appearance. Alice refused to raise her two children in the harsh conditions of homesteading in Kansas and brought them back to Connecticut, to which her husband reluctantly followed.  She also marched for women’s suffrage in 1913.  Ida married a small-time dairy farmer, but she inherited her father’s real estate business. She was successful enough to send all three sons to college in the early 1900s. 

My mother also told me and my children stories of her high school days as a social butterfly and the hardships of the Great Depression and even stories of her failures, like wrecking her sister’s car and getting arrested for driving without a license.  She longed to be a writer as did my sister and I, All three of us have found ways to express that gift, starting with being the associate editors of the Torrington High school newspaper in (respectively) 1926, 1953, and 1958!

I too storytelling seriously, a way to connect  my four granddaughters with their history. My number three granddaughter, Bella, would sit at my dining room table when she was in preschool and say, Grandma, tell me another family story.

Here is one favorite family story about their beloved Aunt Carla at the age of five.  We had just moved for a one-year stay in Boulder, Colorado, and I took the children to school to meet their teachers. I mentioned that Carla, not quite six, could read. Oh, the teacher said,  a lot of parents think their children can read because they have memorized some of their favorite stories.  Let me put it this way,  I said.  I was in the bank with my girls and Carla said, Mommy, do you like service charges? No, I said, why? Well, said Carla, that sign over there says “Don’t like service charges? Neither do we.”  Too young with a September birthday to put in second grade, Carla stayed in first grade in a one-person reading group! Many years later my older sister told me a similar story about my introduction to first grade  when I had been reading for two years. And my youngest granddaughter, despite her protest at age four that she couldn’t read until she was six, was clearly reading signs and menus and cereal boxes! Early literacy tied three generations of readers together.

Storytelling helps you understand where your cowlick and your left-handedness and height or lack thereof came from and which of the members of your extended family shared your gifts—athletic, musical, artistic, or storytelling. Or cooking, or caregiving, or carpentry. And stories of  how earlier generations met and married, and what career paths they chose and why.

It would be nice if your grandchildren made you a card or sent you a text for Grandparents’ Day. But the real challenge is for us grandparents to accept our role of being memory keepers and storytellers who link the generations together.

Holley Ulbrich is a retired Clemson economist with four granddaughters and one great-granddaughter.  You can visit her blog, Purple Sage 41, to read more.

The Joys and Challenges of Aging

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I turned 85 recently, one of those milestones that gets extra attention. This milestone marks the impending end stage of a long and satisfying collection of experiences and companions. There were rewarding achievements and instructive failures, teaching and learning, giving and receiving, reading and writing, caregiving and being cared for, leading and following, taking hold and letting go. Your list may be very different, because my list includes not only family and friends work and communities but also my specific personal experiences, gifts, dreams,  challenges and opportunities.

Many (but not all) of my readers are close to my age, We grew to adulthood in the time of the Cold War, The Pill, Vietnam, Civil Rights, the women’s movement. That context affected us all in different ways, depending on all the dimensions of being that each of us brought to our shared historical and cultural environment. Even if you are from a later generation, you probably have people in your life  who are at this stage and whom you are perhaps trying to understand.

Like everyone else, some big parts f my life were beyond my control. I was female, poor, white, academically gifted and artistically/musically/athletically challenged, a  mainstream Protestant in a sea of ethnic Catholics, growing up in a single parent household in a New England factory town where my ancestors had lived for generations and where extended family still did. Each of those aspects of my identity shaped my hopes, fears, aspirations and constraints.

But so did my choices. The determination to go to college and figure out how to pay for it. My choice of a husband, a wise decision apparently made by my right brain. Becoming an economist. Changing my political identification. Having three children intentionally. Changing my faith identification. Getting involved leadership roles in a variety of communities. Writing textbooks. Running for city council. Writing non-textbooks. Preaching.  Retiring early (and also late). Going to seminary after retiring to study theological ethics.

The last part of life has unique challenges of its own. Hinduism recognizes four stages: the child, the student, the householder (including the work to which one has been elected or assigned), and what we Westerners would call retirement–the time to give up the focus on duties and possessions and  turn to matters of the spirit.

Our challenges in an individualistic society are similar but also different at this final stage. At my age, I am definitely in that fourth stage. But as a daughter of western culture, I think there is still a role for work, meaning and purpose in those as well  as  adapting to our changing roles and abilities. final years.

 I identify four kinds of tasks or challenges for the final years.  Let’s call them Bucket List, Letting Go, Staying Engaged, and Legacy. The next four blogs will each focus on one of those challenges. I would appreciate you sending your comment or stories in response!

Ten Lessons from a Broken Wrist

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40 days ago, I tripped over something that wasn’t supposed to be lying in the middle of the street in Chicago. I suffered multiple injuries but the most serious was a broken radius and ulna in my right wrist. I had broken that same wrist ten years earlier, but this was much more serious.

Every experience can teach us something.

  1. If you must break a wrist, aim for the non-dominant hand. Both times I broke the right wrist. I am left-handed.
  2. Orthopedic surgeons are my new best friends.
  3. Everything is twice as hard with just one sort of good hand (the left sustained less injury)., It gives a very different meaning to “single-handed.”
  4. Friends and family are vital for survival.
  5. I didn’t realize how much I count on being able to drive. I hate having to ask for rides, and I will bear that in mind when it happens to other people, especially those of us who live alone.
  6. Our bones do become more fragile with age.
  7. Teeth can serve as a spare hand.
  8. Putting on underwear and pants is a challenge, T-shirt dresses and elastic waist skirts are a blessing.
  9. 9.Fentanyl while they reset my bones created entertaining hallucinations.
  10. Stay grateful long enough to pass it forward.

Thanks, Mom!

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

It’s Mother’s Day for every living being on earth.  Some of us remember as children celebrating Mother’s Day by making breakfast in bed or taking over some daily chores. Or making a card.  What can we do for our mother Gaia, the earth, today?

We can stop treating our mother the way the boy in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree did.  Haven’t read it? It’s a good place to start your reflection on the primrose path from modest requests to exploitation.

All mothers like flowers (except for some with allergies…).  Plant something that b\blooms.  Plant something that invites bees and butterflies to visit your yard. A bird bath for her feathered children.  No mosquito spraying or toxic herbicides—birds eat mosquitos but shouldn’t drink water that has been sprayed, and dogs and cats roam in grass that is contaminated and harmful to those sprays.     While you are at it, plant a small vegetable garden (or a large one, if you have time to spare) that is organic in every way.  Organic fertilizer. Mushroom compost.  Space permitting, plant a tree, Gaia will be proud of you.

There are other ways in which you can gift your earth mother-–less pollution from fossil fuels, lower the thermostat in our shared house by resisting or reversing climate change in partners with other mother-loving tree huggers.  Hassle hour city council about mosquito spraying and other toxic practices.  Push them for bike paths and sidewalks. streets and more public transportation.

At night, try to enjoy your canopy of starry sky, but it may be hard to see if for all the light pollution.  Can you turn down the lights a little so we can see the earth, and the sound pollution so we can hear the birds?

Thanks, Mother Gaia.  We hope we have come up with some gifts that will last all year and beyond for your grandchildren and outs.

Four Strong Women of the Distant Past

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During Wone’s Herstory Week, I would like to share some of my favorite very historical women with you, all role models for 21st century feminist seeking to reclaim their heritage.  Two of them you most certainly have heard of and the other two, maybe not.  In chronological order, they are Boudicca, Hypatia, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc, or in her native French, Jeanne d’Arc.

Boudicca was queen of the Iceni, a Celtric tribe of western Britain during Roman rule, born in 60 or 61 CE.  Her husband had signed a will leaving his kingdom half to his widow and half to Rome.  Rome wasn’t satisfied.   In fact, they expressed their dissatisfaction by raping Boudicca’s daughters and flogging the queen in public. Outraged, Boudicca raised an army, captured Londinium (London), and defeated the Roman army a second time before losing the third and final battle.  She took poison rather than being paraded through Rome and being thrown to the lions.

Hypatia was a scholar, an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher who taught and wrote and studied in “Alexandria, Egypt in the late 4th and early 5th centuries before the fall of Rome. It was extremely rare for a woman to be found in such an exalted scholarly role. Although she was a pagan, she had cordial relations with the Christians and taught both pagan and Christian students.  She was renowned as a teacher. In March 415, she was attacked and murdered by a band of angry Christians.

Our second queen was Eleanor of Aquitaine, born in 1124 CE. She was first married to the dauphin of France and, after annulment, to Henry II of England, Henry was 11 years younger than Eleanor. It was a stormy marriage. He spent much time abroad fighting and she took care of the kingdom and her eight children in his absence.  When he returned, she supported an unsuccessful attempt by her sons to overthrow their father. Outraged, Henry imprisoned Eleanor for 15 years until his death in 1189. She returned to her ancestral lands of Aquitaine and lived there until her death in 1206, the only one of the four to die a natural death.

Joan of Arc was born in 1412 CE in the little French town of Domremy.  A17-year-old peasant girl, she heard voices telling her to go to the aid of the uncrowned  French king Charles VII. She put on armor and set off  to meet the king, who believed her story and sent her to lead the French army against the Burgundians, French allies of the invading English. The King must be crowned in Orleans.  Defeating the Burgundians, she accompanied Charles to his coronation.  However, things took a turn for the worst, and in a subseuqnt battle she was captured by the Burgundians, who forced her to wear women’s clothing, tried her for  heresy, and burned her a the stake in the town of Rouen at the tender age of 19. Her Hershey conviction was later overturned. The patron saint of France, Joan was canonized by the Catholic church in 1920. The second Sunday in May (Mothers’ Day in the United States) is dedicated in France to honoring the nation’s patron saint.

As I watched NCAAW basketball playoffs this week, I hope the young women who played so well know that they come from log line of strong, brave, accomplished women who made a difference in the world.

Celebrate the Women

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March is Women’s History month, a practice started in the United States in 1897 and joined by Australia (starting in 2000), Canada, the United Kingdom, Russia, Hungary and Ukraine. We do have to share the month with the spring equinox and Saint Patrick’s Day, but it’s still a good time to recall a little “herstory” as we celebrate the women who made a difference in significant ways.  Before we do that, however, I want to remind you of a practice that has help to hide or erase history, and that is the common practice of women changing their last name to their husband’s. Remember the old song about “I’ll be with you in apple Blossom time ,I’ll be with you to change your name to m…,” The name change was for a long time just the tip of the iceberg.  Married women were the property of their husbands, who also owned the kids, her assets, her earnings. As they sing in the musical “Suffs”, a women dies when she gets married. She has ceased to exist as a separate person.

 Most of that changed since the suffragists caught the car they were chasing for 72 years and climbed in the back seat in 1920, but the name change is still a widely common practice in more recent years. I changed my name in 1962.  Two of my daughters did the same in 1993 and 1994, and in 2022 so did one of my grandchildren. My oldest daughter who still lives in our hometown told me only partly in jest that her decision to change her name was not only to acquire a name that was easier to spell and pronounce than Ulbrich but also one that would keep her from always being identified with her somewhat outspoken, activist mother.

There is also the challenge of connecting children to both parents, which is easier if the parents share a last name. Hyphenation is an awkward solution, especially in subsequent generations. What last name would you give to the offspring of Joseph Hall- Berwyck and Annabelle Shultz-Foster?   Where do we go next?

But now there is a new reason to NOT change your name.  If you want to be able to vote, get a credit card in your own name, get a passport, or a variety of other things you just might want to do, it is a whole lot simpler for you to do like your brother or your son or your spouse and just say, “This is me. I was named Susan Smith on the day I was born and I’m keeping that name till I die.  No, dear, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.  But how can I love someone else if I don’t love myself enough to affirm separateness in togetherness?

Having a clear record of name changes since birth is pretty important.  Especially if you married and divorced and changed your name again.   had a grandmother whose name was Gladys Lillian Barber Hewitt Schultz Rockefeller. She carried her whole marital history on her shoulders.

Norse culture had a solution of sorts to the dilemma of family identification and the right to one’s own name.  If Susan Ingridsdottir and John Larson married, their male children would have the last name Johson and their female children would bear the surname Susansdottir. Only siblings of the same gender would share a surname .It might work in a small culture, but probably not in one as large and diverse as ours. And it relies too much on first names which results in a smaller pool of surnames.

So there is a simple solution.  Here’s your name, kid.  My infant great grandchild). .Mabel Kay Didio, bears her father’s surname. At age three weeks, she has no opinion, but she might develop one.  Got a problem with it?  Complain to your parents or hire a lawyer and change it, just like a movie star. Or find a husband with a last name you like better.   But don’t expect the Board of Elections to trust you unless you go through all those papers around the house to provide proof of name when you want to exercise your duty and privilege of choosing the people who run your country.

In subsequent blogs, I am going to offer brief bios of a selection of female heroines I especially admire for defying convention and/or making a significant impact on the course of human evenes..  I invite you to share your own.  Next installment: will feature ancient and medieval women I admire—Hypatia, Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine.