4 October 2025

Here it is, Dear Reader, nearly two months since my last post, well into my birth month, and I’m struggling to account for all that has transpired since last I addressed you..  What’s been happening?  My last hummingbird deserted the feeder outside my kitchen window over a week ago, no doubt bound for warmer climes to the south, and the house now makes the snap, crackle, and pop sounds that I long ago learned signify lower humidity, not some intruder. Autumn has arrived after the driest summer on record in New Hampshire. The leaves are turning early and dropping fast.

I did at last finish painting the deck railing with penetrating oil, readying it for winter. Oh, the MANY surfaces of a Chippendale pattern! And 100 more daffodil bulbs await planting—for the first time ever assisted by an auger bit, once I locate the 20V cordless drill necessary to twirl it.  I’ve made little progress in discarding—another planned summer project—though half our LP collection has now found another home to make way for the 28 Murphy Family photo albums my late mother so carefully kept and my brother-in-law so kindly sent me.  I also spent WAY too much time preparing last Monday’s book talk for the Madbury Library on “Will to Live:  How and Why My Book Came to Be,” both a lamentation about the demise of Shakespeare requirements in a culture with too few common denominators, and a reminder of just how much effort and energy a well-crafted lecture requires.   Thank goodness I’m retired.

Vetting applicants hoping to become our new Madbury Library Director helps to fill my most recent days, along with two book groups, some volunteer driving, and the ever-increasing demands of an aging home and body, punctuated by correspondence with peers fighting the same geriatric battles.  Tai chi and yoga classes help, as do walks in the glorious New England fall.  These sustain.

But there have also been losses beyond remedy:  the unexpected passing of my acting professor and friend of 52 years, Pete Smith, who first gave me the courage to step onstage.  Pete became the devoted husband of my college suitemate, Karen, and the beloved founder of both the Warehouse Theatre in Greenville, South Carolina and the Theatre Department at Sewanee’s University of the South with its very fine Tennessee Williams Center.  Pete leaves a lasting legacy in the generations of students he trained and inspired, but will be much missed.

Closer to home—literally just up the street—a shocking murder/suicide in August left a family of five suddenly, horribly reduced to a single surviving three-year-old, a baffling tragedy that has rocked our little town, reminding us of how little we know the lives of others in our digitally connected and yet dangerously isolated world.  The daily, nearly hourly assaults on democracy of the Felon-in-Chief continue to confound and depress.  Jimmy Kimmel’s muzzling proved temporary, but Colbert’s has not, and today marks day four of a government shutdown irresponsibly, perfidiously blamed on racist lies about funding healthcare for illegals.  And we’ve  lost that talented artist and humanitarian Robert Redford.  I’ve been mourning him by streaming films he either acted in or directed that I’d not seen before, including two from 1992, Sneakers (fun with an amazing cast!) and A River Runs Through It, starring the young, luminously gorgeous Brad Pitt.  The scripted line describing Pitt’s character, Paul Maclean, just as aptly described his director, Redford:  “He was beautiful.”  In every way.

My privileged life nevertheless affords me the leisure to buffer horrors in the micro- and macrocosm.  Reading the role of Nancy Sandberg in David Moore’s scripted version of his 2018 history, Small Town, Big Oil, the tale of how three Durham women bested Aristotle Onassis’s plan to build an oil refinery on Great Bay, gave me a first-ever chance to play someone who was also watching from the audience.

And returning to the refurbished Huntington Theatre in Boston as the new season began with Jez Butterworth’s play The Hills of California, something of a British mashup of Gypsy and Crimes of the Heart, brought me all the reassurance of purposeful assembly in a sacred place, which is what the theatre has long meant to me.

More “No Kings” protests loom.

So does Halloween:  this year the seasonal decorations that appeared in the Home Depot by early September are more grandly animated (and expensive!) than ever.  What does THAT say about our cultural moment I wonder?

Me, I continue to commune with the wild birds, the rafter of turkeys devouring (even more, I hope) ticks, and the deer who’ve decimated hostas and hydrangeas but still manage to spark joy.  Change is in the air.

We prepare for the worst, hope for the better.