Category: Uncategorized
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Comfort and Joy
1 August 2024 Yowza. July was the month that was: first the terrible debate fallout, then the attempted assassination, then Democratic despair over Biden’s determination to continue campaigning, and THEN CrowdStrike’s global software meltdown, followed on Sunday, 21 July by President Biden’s astonishingly brave and patriotic announcement that he was standing down, Vice President Harris’s…
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Home from Wisconsin
21 July 2024 The weather in New Hampshire this Sunday morning has finally returned to the celebrated New England summer temperatures this Florida girl once fantasized about when looking at Lands End catalogs: is’t possible to wear shorts AND a crew neck sweater at the same time? When I arrived home last Wednesday from a…
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Revolution 2024
4 July 2024 On Saturday, 15 June, Durham NH celebrated—six months early—the sestercentennial (aka 250th anniversary) of some doughty Durham residents’ 1774 raid on the British Fort William and Mary in New Castle, enacting there at the mouth of the Piscataqua River the first major act of colonial rebellion that took place four months before…
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Three Graduations and a Funeral, Part 4, 15-21 May 2024: Old Friends
21 June 2024 In the middle chapter of Eudora Welty’s slim volume, One’s Writer’s Beginnings, she writes of “Learning to See”: I think now, in looking back on these summer trips—this one and a number later, made in the car and on the train—that another element in them must have been influencing my mind. The…
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Three Graduations and a Funeral: Part 3, 12-14 May 2024: Blonde Wind
13 June 2024 12 May 2024 began in Whittier NC with my short-term roommate Gina, granddaughter Olivia’s aunt, wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day—a first for me, since I’ve never been a mother; technically a step-grandmother, I found the easy path to grandparenting. Still, that acknowledgment was very sweet, and sustained by that and some…
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Three Graduations and a Funeral, Part 2, 6-11 May 2024: Olivia’s Graduation
11 June 2024 Is’t possible I take up my 3G&1F tale a full month after granddaughter Olivia’s graduation? Tempus fugit. After the Furman 50th reunion/graduation commotion, the quiet intermezzo former roommate Leta and Larry provided me was most welcome, a chance to get acquainted with and admire lives full of civic responsibility and family. When…
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Norm erosion
9 June 2024 With meteorological summer entering its third week, the nights continue to grow longer, the grass grows faster, and the time for seasonal repairs and cleaning is at hand. This past week I also attended the New Hampshire Library Association Trustees conference in Concord, heard internationally known digital services librarian and consultant Nick…
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Hinge Moment
31 May 2024 In his essay collection Languages of Truth, Salman Rushdie proposed that there are “hinge moments” in history when “everything is in flux . . . [and] the future is up for grabs.” Rushdie wrote: “When one lives at a hinge moment in history, as we do, as Shakespeare did when he wrote…
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Home
24 May 2024 Today, Friday, for the third morning in a row I’ve awakened back in my own bed, and, unlike the previous two mornings, I knew where I was. Last Tuesday I drove the 508 miles to Madbury NH from Buffalo NY in a single long haul, arriving back at Gnawwood just before the…
Georgeann Murphy 