Category: Uncategorized
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Shards and Hope
6 October 2026 “The amazement one feels at this stage of life—a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here? How can it be?” (The Correspondent, p. 7). How did the 40-year-old author Virginia Evans, writing here…
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Review Mirror
18 September 2026 Last Friday, 9/11, my beneficent friends Jay and Susan offered me a beautiful alternative to marinating in the horrors of that 25th anniversary: an afternoon observing the monarchs feasting in the pollinator gardens behind the public library in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. Jay Richard, an accomplished wildlife photographer, I first met seven years ago…
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Elephants on Com Ave!
1 September 2026 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,…
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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…
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Shuffle off to Buffalo
24 August 2026 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…
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Homecoming: Union Station and the Pousse-Café
20 August 2026 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…
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Family
1-3 August 2026 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…
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Once More to the Lake
13-17 July 2026 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…
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New York City
17-22 June 2026 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,…
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Anniversaires
5 June 2026 Feeling 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…
