Category: Uncategorized
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October Miscellany: The Helpers
23 October 2023 As my birth month draws to a close, I can report I’ve enjoyed weeks crowded with happy personal incident. And so, Dear Readers, as I suggested last post, it’s the helpers I catalog here, turning away quite deliberately from the horrors of the 24-hour news cycle. Here they are, in chronological order:…
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Close Encounter of the Feathered Kind
12 October 2023 Last night I was out on our deck having my usual evening chat with my late husband David, my habitual practice ever since he left this dimension some four plus years ago. I sit and look at the stars and report out loud how I spent the day—both a good test of…
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Telluride by the Sea
23 October 2023 On this Saturday, the grey first day of autumn, the last rose of summer blooms on my kitchen window sill and I am for the fifth straight day under the weather, still reacting to the RSV vaccination I got last Monday afternoon. I’ve not had a bad cold for so long I’d…
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Mills, Massage, and Madbury Day
12 September 2023 Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead after Dickens’s David Copperfield is a déjà vu delight, though one can only hope Kingsolver’s epigraph borrowed from Dickens resonates for readers: “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” The present rhyming with the past is right up my…
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Janus: Looking back, Looking Ahead
30 August 2023 The last humanities course I taught at UNH in the spring of 2020—which with the arrival of COVID at mid-semester unexpectedly became the last semester in my 43 years of teaching—was HUMA 513, an interdisciplinary introduction to the modern world. As the HUMA team prof covering the literary beat, I referred repeatedly…
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Thanks, Mr. Hanks
22 August 2023 Melissa Kirsch had a nice NYT piece last Saturday morning on “post-vacation clarity,” the fresh perspective one brings home from even a little time away from one’s accustomed place and routine. But I owe the fresh perspective I woke with that morning to Tom Hanks, or at least to the Tom Hanks…
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On Wisconsin, Part 2 4 August 2023
The drive west from Portage to Spring Green, Wisconsin takes about an hour and a quarter, and on Wednesday the 26th, the louring skies made the passing fields look preternaturally green. At noon I reached the Spring Valley Inn, first designed in the early 1990’s by the Taliesin and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation as a…
Georgeann Murphy 