Category: Uncategorized
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Remembering Virginia
At 5.15 on the evening of 2 January 2008, my mother, Virginia Ruth Senseman Murphy, departed this dimension six months shy of her 85th birthday. On this evening almost exactly 15 years later, I am missing her, but recalling lines from Will It Be Okay?, Crescent Dragonwagon’s 1977 picture book classic in which a worried…
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Richard Parker, Ritual, and the Salutary Power of Story, 31 Dec 2022
Terrestrial icebergs line my Madbury driveway this last day of 2022, plow- and weather-sculpted remnants of the one seasonal snowfall we had before the high winds and warm rain of Winter Storm Elliott’s bomb cyclone melted all the other snow and ushered in this dull, overcast, 53o last day of 2022. Last days always seem…
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Christmas Day at Wallis Sands
Though I have lived in New Hampshire since 1995, the beach in winter has not yet lost its novelty for this Florida cracker, remaining for me an exotic inversion of the warm Gulf beaches of my youth in St. Petersburg: white sand and palm trees replaced by rocks and sea ice. Finding myself solo this…
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Hinge Moments: The Orchard and The Crown / 20 Nov 2022
Ever since Daylight Saving Time ended two weeks after I broke my ankle in an earlier careless misstep, I’ve mostly wanted only to eat and to sleep, especially in the mornings when REM time offers the most interesting, sometimes fantastical, sometimes illuminating dreams. I really enjoy what I’ve come to call this recreational sleep, perhaps…
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Fall 2022
Ten days ago I was having a fairly productive day, having gotten up early (8:00 is early for this retiree) and marched through my to do list while Sarah, my house cleaner of many years, worked her magic. Shortly after she left in the early afternoon, I was coming downstairs in my clogs carrying the…
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Halloween 2022
My Grandpa Cecil—Zeke to his friends—was born on Halloween 1897, and today would be his 125th birthday. A true American success story, Cecil Calvert Senseman was the eldest child of Ohio farmer Ed Senseman and his wife Bertha, who died in 1912 when Cecil was 15. Their mother’s death separated Bertha’s children; Cecil, his younger…
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BIRTHDAY No. 70
Today is another glorious autumn afternoon in Madbury NH, a fortnight past celebrating my 70th birthday with good friends on an equally fine day, fall color ablaze outdoors, afternoon light raking through the west windows as supremely talented Parisienne pianist Mathilde Handelsman played a program of Schumann, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Gershwin, ending with a…
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Reunion in Oxford MS 15-19 Sept 2022
My long mid-September weekend in Mississippi meant catching up with both friends of my youth and middle age in two charming and completely different houses, a tonic reminder of southern hospitality seasoned with hilarity, immersion in a way of being ever so far removed from my adopted home of New England, and the formal end…
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Obama portraits postscript: looking back
I got some reflected double images when I shot this photo with my Samsung Galaxy 10; those ghostly blurs are NOT part of Mariana Cook’s 1996 shot. But they make me wonder: could this accomplished young couple possibly have imagined what lay ahead for them? Gazing back through the years is always a double exposure,…
Georgeann Murphy 