Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Message from the Universe, 13 April 2024
So much has happened, Dear Readers, since I last posted on the day my sister died, nearly two months ago now. I’ve yet to record the extraordinary confluence of my sister’s final days with my time in Miami Beach over Superbowl weekend, attending (as Jane insisted I do) three days of my friends’ acquaintance’s extravagant…
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Jane
My baby sister died early this morning, the only person I have ever known for an entire life span, from beginning to end. Her diagnosis of stage 4 cancer last year on 1 April 2023, her and her husband Richard’s 28th anniversary, seemed a cruel April Fool’s joke, but her prognosis then proved accurate: she…
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“Slanders of the Age” and the Write-In Campaign, 1.27.24
This past week I’ve been consumed by two endeavors, volunteering in the Write-in Biden (WIB) campaign and reviewing my KDP editor’s notes on the Henry V chapter of my forthcoming book, Will to Live: Learning from Shakespeare How to Be—and NOT to Be. Doing both in such proximity reminds me of the curious elision of…
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Resolution
10 January 2024 The warm, festive glow of my little 2023 Christmas tree is no more now that Twelfth Night has come and gone, and the tree rests, au naturale and snow covered, on the deck. The library sans decoration now seems both larger and more desolate. Some compensatory cheering arrived on Sunday the 7th…
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Holiday Letter
21 December 2023 The winter solstice arrives today, and I am soon off to my local VW dealer to have my snow tires mounted, however pessimistic I am about having much snow headed our way. In 2022, I got to use my snowshoes (what a delight for this Florida cracker!) only twice. Monday’s big rain…
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Reinforcements
Sunday, 3 December 2023 A “Canyon Country” wall calendar hangs to my left as I type this. By December, the weight of eleven months past is redistributed from January’s heavy-on-the-bottom half of the calendar to the top half, where previously flipped pages one atop the other push on the last page turned until the nail…
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Fall Back
4 November 2023 At 2 pm yesterday GBH newscaster Henry Santoro reminded listeners that we return to Standard Time tonight, “moving from sunshine and happiness to darkness and misery.” As I type this at 6.20 pm, I’m hearing some fireworks—early Guy Fawkes reveling? Or just someone protesting this tipping of too-delicately-balanced psyches toward Seasonal Affective…
Georgeann Murphy 