Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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On Wisconsin, Part 1, 2 August 2023
I returned from my Wisconsin visit to family and friends very early last Sunday morning after a too-long layover in Orlando (consider the carbon footprint of getting from Milwaukee to Manchester NH via Orlando!) and a flight delayed by thunderstorms up and down the east coast. When I woke later that morning and parted the…
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A glooming peace this morning with it brings / 26 Jan 2023
I woke yesterday to what had become the unaccustomed sound of silence from our propane-guzzling generator, which had been running non-stop from 4-something am Monday morning until 2 .07 am Wednesday morning, powering enough circuits to keep heat on and water flowing throughout the most recent if long delayed snow storm of the season. How…
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Submechaniphobia 15 January 2023
My friend Wendy is a fearless adventurer, downhill skier, and scuba aficionado, in addition to her many other accomplished roles including art historian, curator, and first-class cook. I already knew that when yesterday this photo showed up in my email linked to a Facebook post she had made: Wendy inside a Lockheed L1011 air intake…
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Twelfth Night January 6, 2023
In the past, Epiphany has evoked for me many things beyond the charming tale of the three wise men (the assistant magus, the associate magus, and the full magus as Garrison Keillor once told the story) paying homage to the newborn king of the Jews. As an English major, I was taught to associate an…
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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…
Georgeann Murphy 