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Elephants on Com Ave!
1 September 2026
Serendipitously arrived moving truck as caption Last Wednesday I treated myself to the Great Elephant Migration proceeding now through 13 September down the Commonwealth Ave Mall in Boston from Fairfield to Dartmouth. The handiwork of over 300 indigenous artisans of The Real Elephant Collective of the Nilgiri Hills in South India, these 100 elephants seem remarkably at home, though arrested in mid-amble, each a named replica of a real wild elephant in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, each one distinct in size, shape, and remarkably rendered personality.
The Migration is a unique opportunity to stroll safely among a herd of elephants, their progress juxtaposed with the elegant Victorian-era row houses of Com Ave, themselves each distinct Second Empire, French Renaissance, Italianate, and Beaux-Arts beauties. The new Back Bay visitors are composed of a steel framework covered by Lantana camara, an invasive species that smothers elephants’ preferred vegetation, and were created to promote awareness of human-wildlife coexistence, support conservation fundraising, and highlight reuse of invasive plant materials. They are free to observe, and absolutely delightful.
Touchable (and kiss-able and feed-able to all children), the elephants were not, however, climb-able, something of a challenge to parental control.
Testing the limits 
Subhash with the raggedly ear 
City “phant” 
The illusion of forward motion 
Two herds on the move 
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O Canada
29 August 2025
As the Felon-in-Chief (FIC) continues his ignorant and depraved assault on our good neighbors to the north, I have returned from the charming Niagara-on-the-Lake (that’s Lake Ontario, NOT the Lake of America) feeling more embarrassed than ever to be a citizen of what my late husband often called the Un-tied States. My apologies to the Canadians I met on my trip were graciously, even generously met: Steven, whom I encountered on the dog run of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Commons and told none of the dogs in view were mine, assured me these were “community dogs” to be enjoyed by all. Well informed about U.S. politics, he inquired politely about New Hampshire’s “first-in-the-nation” primary status (“vexed,” I replied). And he answered my lament of my government’s egregious abuses with an invitation to move. “We are rich in land and resources. What we lack is people. Come join us!”
Harbour House, the charming boutique hotel where I stayed 
. . . and the very busy harbour close by 
Queen’s Royal Park on the Lake 
Paddlers by American Ft. Niagara, built by the French in 1726 Like so many grieving the loss of the so deeply good Dolly Parton, even as the latest of the FIC’s atrocious, mendacious bullying replays on the news, I’ve been wondering what I could say about my travels at such a time. I went back and re-read Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s powerfully eloquent speech delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on 20 January 2026—ironically the first anniversary of the FIC’s second inauguration. So here I’ll juxtapose images of my delightful time in Ontario—the Falls! The beautiful harbour! The world-class theatre! The vineyards! The gardens! The history!—with excerpts (direct quotations in bold) from a speech all Americans should take to heart, “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path.”
The American Falls at Niagara Falls 
The Canadian Horseshoe Falls 
Rainbow Bridge (1941) and some of the many thrill rides available Early on, Carney quotes Thucydides [mind the gap between this world leader and our own FIC]: “Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” He goes on to reference Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” calling performing the fiction of an international rules-based order “living within a lie.”
“Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. . . . You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. . . .“
Niagara Pumphouse Arts Centre (1891) 
Water testing station at the Pumphouse 
Garden along the Waterfront Trail “Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumption that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security is no longer valid.
Our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb has termed ‘values-based realism’ – or, to put it another way, we aim to be principled and pragmatic.
Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, respect for human rights.
Pragmatic in recognising that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner shares our values. We are engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for a world we wish to be. . . .“
Parterre Garden at the Niagara Botanical Gardens 
Rose Garden and K. Matt Broman Fountain 
. . . and the most orderly vegetable garden ever 
At the entrance to the Butterfly Conservatory 
The most stylish visitors to the Gardens “Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. . . .“
Whirlpool Aero Car (1916) over the Niagara Whirlpool “We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong — if we choose to wield it together. . . .“
Lunching at the Two Sisters Vineyard’s Kitchen76 
Ideal terroir of limestone, gravel, and clay loam “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.“
Niagara-on-the-Lake Commons 
Once a parade ground, now the Commons 
Ft. George (1796-99), destroyed by Americans in May 1813, restored 1937-1940 by Niagara Parks Commission 
Fife and drum corps at Ft. George 
“Brown Bess” demonstration, a musket the source of idioms “lock, stock, and barrel,” “flash in the pan,” and going off “half cocked” 
The Festival Theatre’s tribute to the patron saint of mediocrity 
Four wonderful productions AND 12,000 years of Niagara history in a puppet show! Prime Minister Carney concludes his lucid account of history now in the making:
“But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just.
This is the task of the middle powers, who have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from a world of genuine cooperation.
The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.
That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently.
And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”
Kayakers head for Toronto -
Shuffle off to Buffalo
24 August 2026
Switchback staircase at Oscar’s Inn, Buffalo, New York Now a week past my return from Ontario, I’m still processing my rich journey, weighing those memories against increasing weirdness reported in the 24/7 news cycle. As I was weeding the northeast flower bed yesterday in preparation for the gift of wild irises thinned and donated by my generous neighbor down the road, I heard one story about how human teachers in classrooms might be preferable to humanoid AI robots (!) followed by news of the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games now underway in Beijing: machines apparently smashed human records, although some robotic sprinters crashed into barriers while others tipped over or caught on fire—presumably something those human teachers might not do. Two questions: has anyone seen The Terminator, James Cameron’s iconic film that so ironically premiered in 1984? And was it AI that designed and approved all those NY Thruway signs that read “NO EZ-Pass Call *826*? Methinks including a question mark (No EZ-Pass?) would have kept me from wondering why my EZ-Pass transponder was unacceptable to New York State. Will humanoid teachers stress the importance of punctuation I wonder?
Utica, New York is roughly halfway from my Madbury home to my destination of Niagara-on-the-Lake, and was the first stop on my recent travels, unremarkable save for its Beaux-Arts train station and “Greens Morelle” (aka Utica greens), Chef Joe Morelle’s dish of escarole, garlic, hot cherry peppers, and prosciutto vaunted by the New York Times in 1987 that enticed me to Chesterfield’s less-than-scenic Tavolo patio on North Genesee Street and, alas, proved way too salty and spicy for moi.
View from the patio at Tavolo Unfortunately, Portofino, the restaurant on the Erie Canal I’d visited each time I’d passed that way before, is (note to self) closed on Sundays.
Never mind. A three-hours’ drive next morning took me to my longtime, ever-since-grammar-school friend Martha’s home in the carriage house of one of Buffalo’s Linwood Avenue gilded age beauties and a lovely homemade lunch.
Martha at home on Linwood Avenue For the next 24 hours, we caught up on recent travels, discovering (1) that we had both recently been in New York City, me for the theatre and Martha to spread the gospel; (2) that sustaining herself with sardines puts Martha in the exalted company of comedians John Mulaney and (when he first began as a touring stand-up) David Letterman; and (3) that we both remembered all the words to The Patty Duke Show (on ABC from 1963-1966) theme song about identical twin cousins Patty and Cathy Lane (“Meet Cathy who’s lived most everywhere / from Zanzibar to Berkeley Square / While Patty’s only seen the sights / a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights / What a crazy pair!). Such trivia, I opined, takes up so much space that neither of us could immediately recall the name of the famous landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, and Buffalo’s Delaware Park-Front Street System: Frederick Law Olmsted. This made Martha laugh heartily, to my delight. Without her, I would never have passed calculus our senior year of high school.
From lunch we went directly to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin D. Martin House, FLW’s self-described opus and a real gem at 125 Jewett Parkway.
FLW’s Martin House, 1904-05 
Porte-cochère with entrance concealed behind brick piers with urns Based on a 1901 plan published in Ladies’ Home Journal, “Home in a Prairie Town,” the spatial openness, horizontality, natural palette, and dramatic cantilevers pretty much define the FLW Prairie House; with over 400 art glass “Tree of Life” windows, it surpasses the record of any other.
Entrance windows with sun traps lighting the basement below Interior photography isn’t allowed casual visitors, so you should check it out at https://martinhouse.org/hearth-and-home: the warmth of the front reception room’s sunburst fireplace with its Roman brick gold-washed mortar surround and gold-flecked coved ceiling and the double-sided wisteria glass tile mosaic fireplace of the entrance hall are entrancing.
Nike in the conservatory, the vanishing point of a long pergola 
Back garden, pergola on the left 
Carriage House and Stable: the pillars next to the piers with urns are for clotheslines The Martin house survived intact for two years after Darwin Martin’s death at age 70, but from 1937 remained vacant and abandoned for decades before ultimately renovations begun in the 1990’s were completed in 2019 at a cost of over $50 million. That they did makes me very happy.
Tours here begin with a film at the elegant Visitor Center, where details of Darwin D. Martin’s life (1865-1935) had an uncanny resonance for me. Darwin was a smart boy with a head for figures, scarred at age 6 by the death of his mother and, the youngest of five siblings, forced to part ways with all but his brother Frank, then selling soap in New York City at the age of 13, but finally moving by himself to Buffalo to work for the Larkin Soap Company and via his accounting skills and ferocious work, rising to corporate secretary of the Company, charged with finding an architect to design a new administrative building, and, at his Chicago brother’s suggestion, settling on an innovative young architect: Frank Lloyd Wright. Over the years, Martin, a millionaire until the stock market crash, lent Wright over $70,000 and, allowing him free reign for his designs of both the Martin House and companion summer home on Lake Erie, Graycliff, helped establish FLW’s reputation. Wright never repaid that $70,000 to Martin, though for his dedicated friend and supporter, FLW designed his only cemetery monument, the Blue Sky Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, finally completed in 2004 long after both men has died.
Why did Martin’s story sound so familiar to me? My grandpa Cecil Calvert Senseman (1887-1975) was the oldest of three children born on a farm 12 miles north of Dayton, Ohio. When his mother died, he had to leave school, was separated from his two siblings, and while still a youth, went to work as an apprentice machinist at various factories in the Dayton area. With hard work and, like Darwin Martin, a head for figures (he used to help me with my algebra), in 1931 “Zeke” and his younger brother Vercil purchased the Dayton Tool and Engineering Company and became a major designer and builder of tools supplying the automotive, refrigeration, office, and farm equipment industries, including various government contracts during World War II. Starting in 1938, he also began buying and developing property in Fort Myers, Florida and in 1941, he moved, semi-retired, with my grandmother Clara to Florida, where his good fortune occasioned my own parents’ moving south to St. Petersburg, where I was born: another all-American rags to riches—and back down the ladder of success—story.
C. C. Senseman, my grandpa, at the Dayton Tool & Engineering Company, c. 1931 
Visitor Center at the Martin House (Toshiko Mori, 2009) This tale I told Martha as later that day we enjoyed the capacious porch at Jen and Rob’s lovely boutique bed-and-breakfast inn, Oscar’s, just a few blocks down from Martha’s carriage house on Linwood Avenue.
A Second Empire beauty built in 1875 by Oscar S. Lang, architect and contractor who also worked on the Martin House, Oscar’s Inn is part of the handsome Linwood Historic Preservation District.
Oscar’s Inn 
. . . and another beauty across the street After dinner at Martha’s favorite liver-and-onions place, I passed a lovely night in the Wade Room, and together the next morning, Martha and I shared Jen’s lovely three-course breakfast in the handsome dining room.
Loved the buffalo-shaped chocolates! 
Jen’s strawberry rose breakfast starter 
Hibiscus at Martha’s carriage house Then we headed for a lovely walk around Hoyt Lake at Delaware Park, with views of The Terrace restaurant and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
The Terrace Restaurant in Delaware Park 
A real-life Constable in Delaware Park 
View of the AKG Art Museum across Hoyt Lake 
Edward Broadhead Green’s Fine Arts Pavilion, intended for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 but not completed until 1905, now Buffalo’s Art Museum 
Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here (Nancy Rubins’s canoe cascade, 2010-2011) Finally, almost exactly 24 hours after my arrival in Buffalo, I loaded up my VW GTI and Android Auto GPS and headed for Ontario, the next leg of my adventure, grateful for this best friend of my youth, the gracious hospitality at Oscar’s Inn, and the foresight of those who saved the Martin House for us to contemplate beauty, times past, and times to come.
Queen Anne’s Lace in Delaware Park -
Homecoming: Union Station and the Pousse-Café
20 August 2026
Boehlert Transportation Center/Union Station in Utica, New York. Designed by NY architects Stem and Fellheimer, 1912-1914 (photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, Wikipedia) Union Station in downtown Utica, New York is a Beaux-Arts beauty: 15,000 square feet of rusticated granite and buff brick with a 47-foot vaulted ceiling supported by 34 marble columns. The station’s construction necessitated rerouting the nearby Mohawk River, a grand gesture. Twelve elegant benches heated by steam pipes and vents incorporated into their structure still serve the public, as does an in-station barber shop: one of the few left in this country.
When I visited it around 5 pm on an overcast Sunday night, 16 August, I found it nearly deserted; a single Amtrak train called as I walked about, snapping photos on my cell. I was alone as I left by the south exit: the empty street and brick buildings looked like a set from The Sting, the scene when the Robert Redford character is targeted by the woman he’d spent the night with. Creepy.
And creepier still when I was approached by a lone Black man with a tale of just passing through looking for money to feed a grandson who was nowhere in sight. He was not aggressive or deliberately threatening; I sympathized, told him I was a tourist myself and had no cash on me (a lie), wished him luck, and walked away, hoping someone else would appear. No one did— except the 30-some passengers on the other side of the tracks separated from me by a fence but visible by the time I got to the north side of the building where I could see my car parked at some distance in the visitor lot. It crossed my mind to wonder if anyone would see/hear/help me if I were suddenly attacked. But no one had followed me, and I returned unscathed to my Best Western, got a chicken sandwich from Wendy’s across the street, and ate it while watching a double feature of Jaws 2 followed by the original, magnificent Jaws (poor Roy Scheider looked so miserable roped into that wretched sequel) interrupted by at least 16 Burger King chicken sandwich commercials. How hath the mighty fallen.
That same morning after my fifth and final breakfast at Harbour House in Niagara-on-the-Lake (an appealingly abundant buffet of treats, though I opted each morning for a poppy seed bagel with lox and a schmear) I had strolled one last time to the charming Queen’s Royal Park with its gazebo, lakeside path, and view of Toronto’s skyline across Lake Ontario.
Queen’s Royal Park, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario 
I had, for the third time in my visit, apologized to a Canadian, a fellow guest at our boutique hotel parked next to me in the garage, regretting my country’s abominable treatment of our good neighbor. She was gracious enough to reply, “Well, we’ve got our problems, too.” And then I’d driven one more time along the lovely Niagara Parkway that Churchill once described as the prettiest Sunday drive in the world, passed the Canadian border crossing, and run the no man’s land gauntlet to the U.S. port of entry. The border guard there was a woman with a showy, snowy white manicure who asked my country of origin as she looked at my passport, asked if I had anything to declare (I didn’t—except that I was ashamed of my country, a sentiment I left unspoken), and waved me through with a “Welcome back, Hon.” Easy-peasy. I drove on, westward past legions of metal transmission towers with their high-tension power lines industrializing Niagara Falls, then a huge garbage mountain (monument to excess), followed by the rusty, abandoned amusement park Ferris wheel along I-190. The rain came as I entered the green Mohawk Valley: Leatherstocking country under grey skies, a verdant green breast of the New World left largely unsullied save for the considerable traffic and distantly spaced rest stops along the New York Thruway.
Eight days earlier I’d left home, and now relieved of the anxiety I’ve discovered is an aspect of solo senior traveling (Will I be able to find what I’m looking for without relying on gps I can’t use without incurring international roaming charges? Will I be able to figure out everything I need to about a 2025 still-new-to-me VW GTI setup? Can I keep track of my passport in a purse with too many compartments?) I had plenty of time to ponder events of the past week, layered atop strata of previous experience. I’d first driven this route in 2015 en route to Niagara Falls and the almost impossibly twee Niagara-on-the-Lake for the Shaw Festival to celebrate our 20th anniversary in a campy/classy way.
One of many carefully planted median islands in Niagara-on-the-Lake 
Cannas outside the Courthouse, Niagara-on-the-Lake At the time there was a fresh cement repair of the sidewalk outside Harbour House into which I’d inscribed a small heart. It was still there when we returned a couple years later, and again when I’d returned alone following my husband’s passing in the early summer of 2019; I’d contributed the theatre tickets he couldn’t use to the Festival. And this time, when I went to see if that little heart remained, I went directly to where it should be (a kind of muscle memory?), and lo, there it was: indiscernible to anyone else I’m sure, but present.
Barely there, but if you know where to look . . . And so it was the whole trip: nearly every new encounter inspired memories of previous experiences, a kind of nostalgic pousse-café. That layered liqueur drink is in reality pretty dangerous, violating as it does the “never mix, never worry” rule about alcohol: up to seven layers of different sweet cordials would spell disaster for me were I to indulge.
Photo by Morpheus1703, Wikipedia But I found I could drink this experiential pousse-café composed of chronological strata and, in the words of Joni Mitchell, “still be on my feet.” Pleasantly. Even when unexpected tears arose on crossing back into New Hampshire, recalling the first time I’d driven north from Kentucky to spend my sabbatical with my then still new Love—such delicious anticipation!—and I found myself irrationally hoping that in some Twilight Zone scenario I would find David waiting to greet me again—even then, I was still on my feet. Or my backside: it’s a 5-hour schlep from Utica back to Madbury, wearing on the bum however comfortable the seat.
And so worth the trip: 1100+ miles; 24 hours in Buffalo with Martha, my friend of longest duration; architectural monuments to the Gilded Age inviting comparison with what we and the billionaire class are up to now; a chance to made personal amends to the Canadian neighbors we have sore offended; wonderful food and wine from the fecund vineyards around Niagara; plus a for me always tonic reminder of that uniquely theatrical power, purposeful assembly engineered by skilled professionals working in concert to unify and move a group of otherwise unrelated individuals to a common understanding. Yes, please: more of that.
Details upcoming, Dear Reader. It IS good to be home, even if I DID manage to startle the doe surprised to see me back in residence.
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Family
1-3 August 2026
Erin, Azalea, and Steve arrive at Gnawwood on their first visit to New England Last weekend I had the pleasure of hosting houseguests I didn’t really know and discovering over the course of a little more than a day a surprising but profound connection that belies the literal relationship of first cousins once and twice removed. Undaunted by the bad luck of a rental car with a tire leaking air, they arrived on Saturday evening eager to connect and more than capable of hatching a plan to address that hiccup without compromising our one full day together on Sunday.
I had written to and spoken with Erin, my cousin Barbara’s daughter, before, but never met her husband Steve or daughter Azalea. Nevertheless, by the time we’d working our way through the guacamole—first course of the quasi Mexican dinner I’d planned—the talk flowed comfortably. Was it the Midwestern roots we had in common? Or my delight in recovering the childhood admiration I’d had for my Senseman cousins, the “Big Girls” two and four years older than me, always beautifully groomed and dressed by their glamorous beautician mother, my wonderful Aunt Mart, seeing their good looks and charm reflected in Erin? Or maybe it was just the joy of seeing loving parents ease their clever daughter into overcoming the strangeness of new acquaintance and surroundings? Whatever the charm, it took.
We “did” the Portsmouth area, plunged in the chilly Atlantic waters off Great Island Common in New Castle, and enjoyed the classic family seafood restaurant Warren’s in Kittery.
Family at Cabot Lyford’s 1975 sculpture My Mother the Wind on Four Tree Island at the mouth of the Piscataqua River with Portsmouth’s Memorial Bridge in the background. The inscription reads: “For those who sailed here to find a new life.” A sentiment worth remembering. 
Doggie backpacker on the Peirce Island causeway 
Stairstep cousins at Prescott Park 
Monarch at Prescott Park’s Trial Garden 
Azalea as mountain goat, having scrambled up the granite outcropping on
Great Island Common, New Castle
Great Island Common with the Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse (aka Fort Constitution Light) 
Erin jumps out of the car to check out the Jackson House, 1664, on Christian Shore, the oldest surviving wood-frame house in New Hampshire 
Newly re-opened Warren’s, with excellent service from Romanian waiter Stefan 
Handsome couple Erin and Steve 
First cousins twice removed, ages 73 and 12 
Cousins try to sort out some Bach at the Steinway 
Lovely memento from Steve, August’s sunflowers and asters We looked through family photos so carefully annotated and researched by my mother Virginia, we played the piano together, and Azalea demonstrated her Irish step dancing moves. By the time they departed after Monday’s breakfast, I felt I’d discovered the family I’d been missing, dispelling that last-of-the-Mohicans, no-one-else-knows-the-family-stories isolation haunting me ever since the deaths of my parents and younger sister. To serve dinner on the table I inherited from my grandparents to their great- and great-great granddaughter—the table on which Grandpa Cecil had helped me with my algebra—and at the same time discover how much I liked them all, was a thrill.
So, here’s to the family romance—sometimes actually a tale with a happy ending.
I’m left with part of the resident family at Gnawwood -
Once More to the Lake
13-17 July 2026
Cottage Place Beach at Little Squam E.B. White’s 1941 essay “Once More to the Lake” about his pilgrimage back to the lakefront resort in Maine he visited as a child is a masterpiece often taught in—or, perhaps more accurately, once often taught in—freshman English courses. The last time I taught English 401, I was encouraged to use a collection of quite mediocre student essays as the course “text,” a baffling pedagogical development I chose to ignore, feeling as I too often did in my last few years of teaching that the time was disconcertingly out of joint.
Like White’s essay and my experience of teaching it, my recent trip to Squam Lake (of On Golden Pond fame) was haunted by nostalgia, a term coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer as a translation of the German Heimweh (homesickness), a composite formed from the Greek nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain) to describe the profound melancholia experienced by Swiss mercenaries fighting far away from their native Alpine terrain. The emotion is a complex one, and the word to describe it evasive, elusive, and (it seems) culturally specific. In Turkish, the word is hüzün, a shared, quiet state of loss. I’m partial to the Portuguese saudade, pronounced as an onomatopoetic sigh, a deep emotional state of melancholic longing, a bittersweet yearning for the absent presence of someone or something that is loved and irretrievably lost, combining the sadness of that loss with the warmth and joy of having loved.
What word best describes what is driving Matt Damon’s Odysseus in the Christopher Nolan film, as opposed to Homer’s Odyssey? A topic for a different post. This one is about my friend Cameron’s and my return to places we’d visited with our late husbands, hers the composer Russell Peck, whose music was often programmed for the New Hampshire Summer Music Festival held each summer at Plymouth State, and my David, classmates at the University of Michigan in the turbulent late sixties, both of them part of the avant-garde John Cage-affiliated progressive new music scene then in Ann Arbor. Cameron and Russell spent 13 seasons around the New Hampshire lake district, and twice David and I went up—once even flew up in a doughty Piper Warrior!—to join them for concerts and long conversations had while afloat in a lake, once Squam and once Kanasatka. Cameron had not been back for decades; neither had I—and quite possibly David and I were along on that couple’s last return to the lakes. I can’t remember the year.
But Russell departed this dimension in 2009, as did David in 2019. Could the wives left behind return to the lake and recapture any of that joy? The answer: Reader, we did. Ocular proof follows.
We arrived on 13 July, which would have been my David’s 83rd birthday 
Our cabin looked out on Little Squam, cozy with just the right amount of funk 
First day attraction: a visit to the remarkably informative and fun for all ages Natural Science Center. Did you know that foxes smell like skunks, or that mountain lion fur feels incredibly soft to the touch? 
Resident catamount, a species now officially extinct in New Hampshire, though there are still occasional reports of unverified sightings. 
Cameron the Intrepid bravely navigates her first scooter over hills and dales, courtesy of the Center. 
One of the few deer who have NOT been eating my hostas 
Mill Falls Marketplace in Meredith NH, home to Giuseppe’s, an excellent pizzeria 
Next day’s adventure: the Natural Science Center’s Discovery cruise 
Walter’s Basin restaurant, just through the channel that connects Little Squam to Squam Lake. Walter’s is named for the fish caught and released in the 1981 film On Golden Pond. We enjoyed two excellent meals there, complete with lake views. 
The very marina where Katharine Hepburn as Ethel Thayer gassed up and shopped 
Entering Squam Lake: picture-perfect New Hampshire 
Captain Hugh on the Loon 
Looking for loons while on the Loon 
Approaching “Purgatory Cove,” of Golden Pond fame, suitably forbidding with strong wind chop and Canadian forest fire smoke greying the sky. Cpt. Hugh told us that the beautiful mahogany 1950 Chris-Craft Sportsman used in the film was too sturdy to break even when repeatedly run onto the rocks there. The film crew had to build a “crash replica” with a thinner hull panel that would burst on impact to scuttle the Thayer IV. 
Rattlesnake Mountain. Note to self: must return to hike the famed overlook trail. 
Daisies at the dock 
John Davidson’s summer nightclub in the impossibly quaint Center Sandwich 
The Squam River covered bridge in Ashland 
The Ashland Town Beach: a rare public beach on Little Squam 
A superior pre-concert dinner at Yamas Greek Eatery on Main Street in Plymouth 
Musicians tune at the Silver Center for the Arts Hanaway Theater before a delightful “Italian & American Summers” program: Respighi’s Trittico botticelliano, Barber’s haunting “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (beautifully sung by soprano Ashley Marie Robillard,) Anna Clyne’s “Restless Oceans,” and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4, Op. 90, “Italian.” Cameron re-connected with principal cellist Walter Grey. 
Next day’s drive took us as far north as Mt. Washington for this view of New York architect Charles Alling Gifford’s storied hotel. Built in 1902, it served the elite escaping to the White Mountains with 57 trains a day. 
Old friends southward bound, about to head home -
New York City
17-22 June 2026
The fabled City comes into view My very first glimpse of New York City came from a bus window in the winter of 1971 as I traveled with classmates in my Furman University Intro to Theatre class to stay at the Hotel Great Northern near Carnegie Hall, eat my first gefilte fish at a deli across the street, attend a taping of The Dick Cavett Show (Danny Kaye was the guest—I got Cavett’s autograph after), and see some wonderful theatre, including Claire Bloom starring in both A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler and the original production of Hair. The over-the-knee stockings I thought fashionable enough for the City fell down around my ankles as I stood in front of the Empire State Building; I don’t recall how I coped with that. I do remember that later in the 70’s, my friend Jimmy, aware of my champagne tastes and limited budget, tweaked me with a gift book titled New York on $500 A Day.
Well, times have changed: that amount doesn’t cut it in New York City today. Like the culture, much is different, for better and for worse. Times Square is much less dangerously squalid, though much more congested. You can’t buy a blue tablecloth at Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s, where the selection is limited to three or four floral patterns, and the salesclerk at Macy’s smirked when I asked where the tablecloths were. (Does no one use a tablecloth anymore?) And the Oyster Bar at the Plaza no longer exists, site of a rendezvous with my future husband for a glamorously romantic date in November 1994—after flying respectively from Kentucky and New Hampshire, we walked into the Palm Court from separate entrances at exactly the same moment. A cherished cinematic moment.
Getting around in New York, especially for this senior wondering if she’s still up to finding her way, is, however, so much easier these days. An OMNY pass (only $1.50 a ride for seniors!) and smartphone with Citymapper app loaded are all you need: no fumbling with cash or credit cards in subway stations. And since these days EVERYONE’s gaze —not just a disoriented tourist’s—is constantly on a phone, it’s possible to pass as a local.
Besides, people seem friendlier. I didn’t hear a harsh word spoken the whole five days I was in town. One stranger asked politely if I had the time, and thanked me when I told him. And when at intermission I complimented the woman seated next to me in the Winter Garden theatre on her summer-y linen ensemble, she volunteered that she got it on sale from J. Jill for only $40!
My first full day back in New York was the day of the Knick’s victory parade in lower Manhattan (I stayed well north in Midtown), and World Cup fans were everywhere, sporting their team’s kits, making overheard conversations—such a delight in the City—even more international than usual. So lovely to see so many happy, hairy men greeting both men and women with kisses on each cheek. The town seemed awash in goodwill, a refreshing breeze and tonic change from the bitterly ironic, algae-slimed pool of despair tainting so many of our days in these Un-tied States. Hundreds of yogis in Bryant Park! A messenger boy on a bike careening down Broadway sans helmet while taking a selfie! A pretty blond girl yakking on her phone, dressed in gauzy white linen and a T-shirt whose rhinestones read “Blow Me,” striding across a subway grate à la Marilyn Monroe. Some sidewalks still smell of urine. But the homeless woman camped out on W 37th fed the pigeons every morning. Ah, New York!
Yogis in Bryant Park, 17 June 2026 
I had a grand time. Saw three superior productions; two intriguing museum shows; visited two good friends; walked that wonderful urban park, the High Line; and got my urban chops back.
My friend Glenn in the Met, posing with the Roman man who, he says, so resembles his dad 
The Met’s Great Hall, seen from the balcony café where we lunched. 
Times Square, 18 June 2026 
Lithgow acted his final monolog, a verbatim transcript of Roald Dahl’s incendiary phone conversation with a reporter, only feet away from my seat. Great actor, important play. 
Walking the High Line, starting at the Gansevoort entrance 
Original rail bed reclaimed by flowers 
Good day for a sail on the Hudson 
Derek Fordjour’s Archetype II: Servility, 2026 
30 Hudson Yards (Kohn Pedersen Fox, 2019) features the Edge, the highest outdoor skydeck in the Western Hemisphere 
Luxury apartments, part of the Meat Packing District revitalized by the High Line 
15 Hudson Yards: the quatrefoil skyscraper at the north end of the High Line 
Detail of the telescoping Shed, cultural center and performing arts venue 
Angles at Hudson Yards 
. . . where substructure work continues 
Soaring skyscrapers at the High Line’s northern end 
. . . and charming, well-informed guides 
Central Atrium Staircase at the New Museum in the Bowery, with Klára Hosnedlavá’s 4-story soft sculpture Shelter (2026) 
Jeremy Deller’s Motorola WT4000 Wearable Terminal, 2013, part of the “New Humans: Memories of the Future” show at the New Museum. The work replicates the kind of electronic device used in fulfillment centers to track worker efficiency. 
Language of Mud, Tamara Henderson, 2018 
Detail of Ville fantôme (Ghost town), Bodys Isek Kingelez, 1996 
Andro Wekua’s disturbing Untitled, from Some Pheasants in Singularity, 2014. A lifelike mannequin of a teenager appears to be suspended several inches above the ground by its chin. Wires protrude from the figure’s back, connecting it to a black box, and the fingers on its right hand rhythmically twitch while its left arm disappears into a futuristic metal cast. 
Real girl, not suspended, on the phone at the New Museum 
The august Plaza Hotel upstaged by the City’s new skyline of needle-like skyscrapers 
Bubba Weiler’s moving new play, a study in grief, human nature, and what makes life bearable, as well as the power of brilliantly acted theatre 
The welcoming Petra Bar in the StudioSeaview theatre off Broadway 
Family brunch at the Carnegie Diner at the corner of 50th and 8th Avenue 
Miller’s famous line given new resonance in 2026 
Brilliant production, brilliant cast. Biff’s confession destroyed me. On the ride to Port Authority, my Uber driver Pema told me he had a cousin in New Hampshire, where a four-bedroom house cost only $450,000. So much cheaper than New York, he sighed. Yes, I agreed.
Looking down the Hudson at a skyline rather different from what we saw in October 1998 when David flew us down the river at 500 feet, self-reporting and significantly lower than the Twin Towers we passed. Sigh. And then, after six hours uneventful hours reading Alice Munroe stories on the C&J coach headed north, I arrived back at our home and a drippy, dusky evening. Walking once around the house, my custom after time away, I heard some clicking sounds coming from the stand of trees in front of the house. Birds? Frogs? Then, as I started to walk down the driveway to collect my mail, I heard a huffing sound to my right. And then a growl. Oh. The black bear, the one who’d twice deconstructed my bird feeders and was only briefly deterred a third time when I yelled at her from the deck, was just to my right—and judging from the warning she gave, possibly accompanied by cubs.
I apologized, loudly, for the intrusion, backed swiftly away clapping my hands, and retreated down the hill and back inside through the garage. Safely home. After my adventures in the big city, I had returned to the frontier.
Time Square by night, the 250th Fourth of July approaching. -
Anniversaires
5 June 2026
Thomas W. Lamb’s 1928 masterpiece, now Citizens Bank Opera House
and home to Boston BalletFeeling anxious and untethered, Dear Reader? You are not alone; daily experience is not what it used to be. In our PC (Post Colbert) era, so much that was customary is no more, and adapting to the ongoing speed and breadth of change a constant challenge. I loved hearing the legendarily innovative Sir Paul McCartney, a surprise guest on Colbert’s last Late Show, complain about updates on his iPhone: he bought it, he learned how to use it, why should he have to keep learning how to use it all over again? Me, I continue to struggle with my new car AND my new phone; the two do not always play nicely together. Last Friday I was pretty sure I had figured out, definitively, how to get both to communicate. Android Auto came on as it should, as did the radio station I’d programmed; hurrah for me. Then, before I could pull out of my parking space, a pop-up appeared on the car screen, obscuring the map that had been there moments before. I touched it to make it go away, and that turned off the radio.
Exasperated, I exclaimed, “Oh, f*** me!” To which my CAR replied: “I don’t respond to harsh language.” What the hell? I bought this car, and now it’s chiding me for responding to its maddening technical gotchas with profanity? Maybe I should be grateful it didn’t take my “request” literally. Welcome to the robot apocalypse.
With the 250th Fourth of July approaching, and a series of personal anniversaries involving Memorial Days past continually conjuring and then usurping attempts to stay in the present moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about why we cling to these life markers, metaphorical hash marks on the door jambs we passed through long ago, and strategies to keep the less-than-tonic aspects of nostalgia at bay. One answer was a dinner party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our move into our then brand-new home over Memorial Day weekend 2001, the planning, cooking, and good company distracting from the sadness of my darling husband’s not being at table to join the toast. David departed this dimension around midnight on 31 May 2019. Exactly seven years later, I went to the ballet.
Pausing before a display in the Citizens Bank Opera House, originally the B. F. Keith Memorial Theatre, theatre architect Thomas W. Lamb’s 1928 masterpiece, I felt grateful for the $38-million dollar restoration that brought so magnificent a building back to life in 2004. One explanatory sentence glossed the principle behind the restoration: “The gold leafing was purposefully applied to appear less bright, as if the theatre and all its ornamentation had simply aged, gracefully, over three quarters of a century.”
Lamb’s decorative plaster dragons, the lower one restored and aging gracefully, the upper one a replacement cast waiting to be tastefully gilded Contrast that with what The Guardian (31 Aug 2025) called the “extreme goldening of the Oval Office.”
The gilding (guilting?) of the Oval Office: coasters, tympanum, cherub, and new painting (composite photo by Getty/Rex/AP) 
Zelenskyy with FIC at a press conference, August 2025
(Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP)
Contrast Zelenskyy with Biden in the Oval Office 2022
(photo by Brendan Smialwoski/AFTOh, I thought, best to head for my seat and avoid that particular rabbit hole of distress.
That was the right move. A chatty young lady named Leah seated next to me provided pre-show and entr’acte entertainment, speaking Russian to her mom and English to me, detailing her affection for ballet (she’d seen Swan Lake and The Nutcracker before), her stellar performance on a recent math exam (“I’m proud of my A+!”), and the excellence of our orchestra seats (“I’ve never been this close before!). The lushness of both production and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty score kept me, like Leah, raptly focused, enchanted by consummate artists at work on stage, backstage, and in the pit.
Pre-show practice in the pit 
Ji Young Chae and the artists of Boston Ballet (photo by Liza Voll) I’ve been moved to tears at the ballet before, but the gorgeous mutual adoration of Aurora and her Prince, so exquisitely rendered in dance by Ji Young Chae and Jeffrey Cirio, had a special poignancy for me on the seventh anniversary of my own Prince’s departure. As the orchestra began Tchaikovsky’s “Grand valse villageoise,” the lyrics from the animated 1959 Disney Sleeping Beauty came immediately and unbidden to mind:
I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream
I know you, the gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam
And I know it’s true that visions are seldom all they seem
But if I know you, I know what you’ll do
You’ll love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream.Yeah. That’s pretty much the way it was. Never underestimate the influence of romance on a young girl.
A gentle rain had begun by the performance’s end, but umbrella in hand, I decided to stroll the Common to collect myself and allow the parking garage traffic to clear.
The Parkman Bandstand, 1912 
The Park Street Church, 1809, at 217 feet once the tallest building in the early 19th-century U.S., now upstaged by the Millennium Tower, 2016, at 60 stories/684 feet, one of Boston’s highest I was happy to realize it wasn’t just lyrics heard as a seven-year-old that I remembered: I wanted to revisit the Shaw Memorial, and recalled just where it was, directly across from Charles Bulfinch’s State House.
Massachusetts State House, Charles Bulfinch, architect, 1798 
Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial,
bronze relief by Augustus Saint-Gaundens, 1897This, of course, evoked more memories of the first time David brought me there, as well as our visit to Saint-Gaudens’s studio in Cornish, NH. But what the sculpture memorializes—the courage of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of African American soldiers, so many of whom gave the last full measure of devotion to the Union—diverted my nostalgia in another sad direction.
With the 250th Fourth of July celebrations only a month away, the Felon-in-Chief (FIC) proposes celebrating with a cage match, the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) Freedom 250, on the south lawn of the White House (!) on 14 June, the FIC’s 80th birthday (!!). And his MAGA minions have proposed his portrait on a $250-dollar bill (!!!). Celebrating the felon who would be king—what could be further from what the Founders envisioned on that July fourth in 1776?
I was back down the rabbit hole. Time to go home. Heading back to the parking garage, I passed The Embrace memorial to Coretta Scott King and MLK, Jr., who met in Boston in 1952. The Embrace, according to an adjacent sign in the Freedom Plaza, “reflects the power of collective action, the role of women in the freedom movement, and the forging of solidarity out of mutual empathy and vulnerability.”
The Embrace, unveiled on Boston Common, January 2023 
The takeaway engraved behind The Embrace Designed by Hank Willis Thomas, the sculpture depicts the couple’s intertwined arms and commemorates the famous hug they shared after Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Right there in American’s oldest public park, Ladies and Gentlemen! A monument to empathy and self-sacrifice. Whatever you think of the sculpture (I’m not a fan), it’s pretty much the opposite of a cage match on the Felon-in-Chief’s birthday.
Back in the garage, I was luckily diverted from my return to the rabbit hole by a new problem to solve: my small VW GTI was pinned in a corner spot with a large truck to my left, a supporting pillar to my right, and an even bigger truck with a long bed parked perpendicular to my space. If I backed straight out, I would hit it. Attention must be paid! Getting my car out of that space took about 15 sweaty minutes, inching forward, backward, forward, backward, adjusting the exit angle ever so slightly with each maneuver. Finally, with side mirrors folded in and a prayer, I eased out of the spot with nary a scratch. And there were no more problems exiting Boston. But when I returned home, I saw that for the second time in three weeks, a bear had deconstructed my elaborate bird feeder system.
Strangely, I didn’t feel all that bad. Somehow my sad gloom had dissipated. And then I remembered our late Dean Palmer’s answer when I asked him how he managed to carry on after losing first his wife and then his only child, all the while suffering increasingly debilitating Parkinson’s. The answer (from a man who navigated bombers over Germany in WW2): “Life is all problems. The trick is to stay interested in solving the problems.”
Right. The next day, 1 June, the seventh anniversary of David’s departure from our home for the final time and the sixth anniversary of my retirement from 43 years as a professor, I had a lovely walk on a new-to-me trail with good friends.
Dragonfly observed on the Leighton Forest trail, 1 June 2026 I then went out and bought new support poles for the bird feeders, and booked tickets online for me and another friend to see The Producers at the Ogunquit Playhouse come August. The day after, I installed the new poles, went to yoga class, got a haircut, and made plans to meet up with another old friend in New York City to see the Raphael show at the Met before it closes. And I mowed the lawn. Staying interested in solving problems.
So, Dear Reader, here’s to hope and happy anniversaries, the past in the present.
Spiderwort in bloom with turkey hen, happy to find the bird feeders restored 
Sunset with waxing crescent moon from the deck, 21 May 2026 -
Into the woods
14 May 2026
Walden Pond, 30 April 2026 We went to the woods last April, specifically Walden Pond, because we wished to revisit what it meant to Thoreau and what it might mean to us now. Katherine, one of our core Madbury Library Book Club quartet, had last November gifted us with illustrated copies of Autumnal Tints, Henry David Thoreau’s poetic and philosophical essay first posthumously published in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1862, a detailed guide to the colors of a New England autumn urging the reader to play close attention to the deeper meaning of the season’s transformation. Henry David’s exhortation prompted me then to suggest a spring field trip to Walden Pond, which I’d not visited since my Americanist husband had taken me there on one of my early visits to him in New Hampshire, part of a courtship campaign that ultimately succeeded (happily for both of us). On learning that Walden Pond, a State Reservation managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, draws 600,000 visitors a year, often filling the parking lot and closing the park early in the day, we chose the last day of April for our visit to avoid the crowd.
Site of Thoreau’s Cabin, 1845-47 As it happened, a rainy day kept most folks away: when we arrived around 10.30, we were the only car in a parking lot so empty that the ranger staffing the handsome Visitor Center (built mostly from native lumber) waived the $30 parking fee normally charged out-of-state visitors.
Georgeann, Diane, Katherine, and Susan visit Walden Pond We watched the excellent orientation film, like the recent PBS series, another evocative Ken Burns production, this one narrated by the late Robert Redford. That and the misty grey weather added to a sweetly melancholy nostalgia I felt thinking of all that has been lost since Thoreau’s deliberately chosen tenure by the Pond.
Replica of Thoreau’s hut 
Original site of Thoreau’s cabin In the weeks since, our visit to Walden and the Old Manse on Concord, home to the Rev. William Emerson (1743-1776), Revolutionary firebrand and from his window, eyewitness to the Battle of Concord on 19 April 1775, as well as the grandfather of American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, has for me often flashed “upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”
The Old Manse, home of the Rev. William Emerson, built 1770 
View of the North Bridge from the Old Manse 
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing chair, which he would take outside to compose, with a copy of his essay Nature 
Old Manse’s central staircase. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne also lived in this very literary house I know I am not alone in experiencing the bewildering juxtaposition of past and present, both personal and historical, I think characteristic of Boomers by virtue of their age prone to reminiscence and at the same time baffled, alternately enraged and rendered despondent, by the desecration of truths we once believed self-evident. More than midway along the journey of our life, we find ourselves within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway has been lost (pace Dante via Longfellow). What comfort, then, from the Northern Pine-Oak Forest of Walden Pond, and all it has come to represent?
A few days before we went to the woods (negotiating heavy traffic on 95 and 495, hazards with which Henry David did NOT have to contend) on 25 April, alleged assassin Cole Allen released his manifesto as a timed email moments before he stormed the security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents Dinner. His “Apology and Explanation” is very disturbing, however accurate its initial reasoning: “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me.” Surely opening fire on an assembly with the stated goal of taking out as many of the assembled Administration as possible (with apologies for any collateral damage) is not the nonviolent resistance, the “civil disobedience” that Thoreau advocated, inspiring later peaceful protests as disparate as those of Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.—both of them, we must remember, an assassin’s victim. But! What happened at the North Bridge so close to the Old Manse WAS violent, as was the revolution we are exhorted to celebrate on its 250th anniversary.
North Bridge (“the rude bridge that arched the flood”) with Minute Man statue 
Site of “the shot heard round the world” 
North Bridge Pigeon hoping for a handout Our first American Pope, Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago, is also the first Augustinian pope in history, a friar who has lived vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, focusing on community and the teachings of St. Augustine, which he studied in seminary and at Villanova University, including the definition of a just war conducted to restore peace, remedy injustice, and authorized by a legitimate authority, never motivated by cruelty or greed. And yet, on 14 April Vice President J.D. Vance, first confirmed as a Catholic in 2019, cautioned this pope to “be careful” when discussing theology and public policy. The time is out of joint. Or, “That does not compute” (Robby the Robot, Lost in Space, 1965-1968).
April may not be the cruelest month, but this April may be the most weird. While Vance attempted to school the Pope, King Charles III in his first state visit as a monarch addressed Congress on 28 April, and schooled that assembly on their own history, “a tale of two Georges,” Magna Carta, and limiting executive power, a statement that received a hypocritical standing ovation from the assembly, clapping FOR curbing the “capricious and tyrannical actions” of a monarch.
The King and the Man Who Would Be King prior to Charles III’s address to Congress, 28 April 2026 (photo by Kenny Holston for the NYT) 
Queen Camilla and King Charles arrive at the joint session of Congress
(photo by Salwan Georges for the NYT)A life-long environmental advocate, the King went on to urge global action to treat Nature as a “precious and irreplaceable asset.” More clapping. To quote the Scrivener in Richard III, so aware of political hypocrisy: “Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device?” Or this from another more recent poet: “Send in the clowns / Don’t bother. They’re here.”
Michael Jochum, author of Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition, a series of essays published on social media, captured my combined admiration and distress on hearing King Charles’s wittily eloquent stealth critique of our current politics, the experience of “witnessing a speaker who understands not only the power of language, but the responsibility that come with it. . . . Listening to Trump after Charles is like following a symphony with a kazoo solo. One man builds an argument; the other builds a grievance. . . . Somewhere along the way, we traded eloquence for noise, clarity for chaos, and principle for performance.”
Schooled by a rock/jazz/nu metal drummer! Who’d have thunk it? Jochum’s own command of language sends me back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature, composed there at the Old Manse: “Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.” I can’t help but think of how language is the stone that makes the ripples of influence I was feeling that damp day at Walden Pond as we walked and talked and tried to think our way back to Thoreau’s time there, suddenly ripped from the moment by the sound of the T, Boston’s light rail transit system, roaring by.
And it is language that again has me straddling past and present. At the Portsmouth Public Library, this month’s Shakespeare play to discuss will be Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play all about the limits and abuses of language—as I argued well over 40 years ago when I wrote my dissertation on that play. And a real old-style dissertation it is, tracing anti-rhetorical tradition and genre theory from the classics to the still debated date of that play’s composition. Writing it was not, however, a labor lost: doing so initiated all the good fortune I’ve since enjoyed. But oh! Re-reading it now! Soooooo many footnotes! Even when writing it, I suffered Berowne’s indictment of academe:
Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
That will not be deep searched with saucy looks.
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books. (LLL, 1.1.84-87)
Reviewing what I once knew, mostly now forgot and frankly irrelevant, spurred me to a happier experience, however: streaming the Royal Shakespeare Company’s brilliant 2015 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost (directed by Christopher Luscombe and set in 1914 at Charlecote Park).
Nick Haverson as Costard and John Hodgkinson as Don Armado in the RSC’s 2015 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost directed by Christopher Luscombe For $2.99 on Amazon Prime—a resource to me beyond imagining in 1984 when I was dissertating—I could re-live the thrill of the best possible production of a play so clearly meant for the stage and not the page, and the many times I had that experience in person there in Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as lagniappe, just two days ago on Morning Edition (12 May 2026), I heard the results of the University of London study establishing that biological aging can be slowed by arts engagement—even to the same extent as physical activity helps maintain genetic function over time. And the effects of that engagement are equally salutary not only for those who produce art, but also for those who partake by visiting concerts, theatres, or museums! Hurrah for epigenetics! Ground-breaking research, not base authority from others’ books.
The 1864 Steinway Square Grand Piano in the North Parlor of the Old Manse, the study used by both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Making music has always been salutary. And so, Dear Reader, as I get the final Euflexxa shot to my right knee next week (my P.A. calls Euflexxa the Ozempic of orthopedics) and attend my monthly Death Cafés, I am buoyed by the thought that going to the ballet, seeing brilliant theatre (and that RSC production qualifies), or even (I daresay) writing this blog, is slowing the rate of my decrepitude. So I keep writing to my representatives to reverse the perilous course of their pathway to autocracy, advocating for and attending to the arts, and taking walks in the woods. Emerson wrote in his Nature, that “In the woods, we return to reason and faith.” You got that right, Ralph Waldo: there I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity, which Nature cannot repair.
The Concord River from the old North Bridge 
Susan and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests birding on Saturday morning, 9 May 2026. Emerson would approve. -
Mother’s Day
11 May 2026
Boston’s Public Garden on Mother’s Day 2026 A life crowded with so much pleasant incident of late prompts me to jump accounting for those less recent experiences to focus here on yesterday, spent first taking in Boston Ballet’s “Spring Experience” and then watching folks recreate in the Public Garden. Mother’s Day proved a great time for enjoying fair weather and flowers in the park.
The Ballet’s wonderful program proved too much, however, for the dutiful mom and her youngest daughter seated next to me at the Opera House. Lia Cirio’s abstract After with its striking tableaux and origami seashell got the better of a squirmy girl; mom and daughter left after After.
Boston Ballet performs Lia Cirio’s After (Rosalie O’Connor photo) The mom, a fellow subscriber, mentioned she hoped for more patience with Sleeping Beauty at month’s end. I’ll confess that After challenged me as well, but the long program that followed engaged me completely, especially the pas de deux that begins William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman, a witty battle of the sexes in yellow skirts danced to perfection by Madoka Sugai and Tyson Ali Clark. I’d love to see that again right now. Jerome Robbins’s hour-long Dances at a Gathering also delivered, not only in the technical finesse of the company, but also with guest pianist Nan Ni’s stupendous performance of the knuckle-busting all Chopin score.
Boston Ballet in Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering (Rosalie O’Connor photo) I had come to the Opera House looking for solace and distraction from 24/7 news of wrecking balls taken (sometimes literally) to democracy. Mission accomplished.
Then it was time to stretch my legs en route to the Public Garden with a turn around the Common, the oldest public park in America (est. 1634). Perched on a tree leaning over the pond—one irresistible to climbing kids once I vacated it—I deployed my smart phone to connect with my brother-in-law Richard and share the complexities of Mother’s Day for members of what Kate Spencer has dubbed the “Dead Moms Club.”
My perch usurped by monkey kids It’s 18 years since my mom Virginia passed, only 2 since my sister Jane, Richard’s wife and Daniel’s mom, left, and the only constant is the absent presence of both. Relationships remain dynamic, even with the departed. Richard and I agreed on the persistence of grief, the perniciousness of a broken health care system and predatory insurance companies, and the salutary comfort of music and good deeds. We shared photos. And then I strolled, taking in the many moms and kids, sweet couples, proud grads, and soooo many photographers.
l to r: Arlington Street Church (1860), the Old John Hancock (now Berkeley) Building (1947), and John Hancock Tower (1976). N.B.: A.I. misidentified every building in this photo. Beware Google Photos “intelligence”! On my way back to the parking garage (with the Opera House crowd now happily discharged) I passed the Burying Ground, a memento mori juxtaposing all the new beginnings of Spring and the day.
And there at the corner of Tremont and Boylston overlooking the Common, I noticed the mosaic seal of the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts, with beavers representing the industriousness, community, and collaborative nature of builders, aligning with the foundational principles of Masonry, adopted (I subsequently learned) from the coat of arms of the Premier Grand Lodge of England. Given that our home, Gnawwood, was named for our tutelary beavers, I was pleased to see them celebrated flanking the core guiding principle of the Masons: “Follow Reason.”
“Follow Reason.” Words of wisdom from 1733 for this, our plastic moment.
Point taken. Happy Spring!
Tulips at the Public Garden, Boston AFTER, Arlington Street Church, beavers, Boston, Boston Ballet, Boston Common, Central Burying Ground, DANCES AT A GATHERING, Grand Masonic Lodge of Massachusetts, HERMAN SCHMERMAN, Jerome Robbins, John Hancock Tower, Lisa Cirio, Madoka Sugai, moms and kids, Mother’s Day, Old John Hancock Building, Public Garden, tulips, Tyson Ali Clark, William Forsythe
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Georgeann Murphy 