Category: Uncategorized
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Into the woods
14 May 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…
-
Hope
7 April 2026 Waking to snowfall this morning—belated April Fooling from Mother Nature—surprised me out of the incipient MADD-ness (Mixed Anxiety-Depressive Disorder) that has too often characterized my first waking moments of late. Accustomed to feeling overwhelmed by worries personal (the whips and scorns of time) and public (a world subject to the Felon-in-Chief’s latest…
-
Bridging the Gap with Living Art
In his 1960 introduction to the Viking Compass edition of his 1955 play A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller wrote of how rarely a play gets a second chance: it “makes its mark right off or it vanishes into oblivion.” He goes on, however, to examine the success of both that play and The…
Georgeann Murphy 