Here was my week: Monday When I got home in the afternoon, I found Mayday, my 13-year-old mini-schnauzer, sitting in the corner, staring at the floor and trembling. When I picked her up, she felt hot. A few months ago she had been in hospital for a week with a high fever. The cause was […]
Our Best Cook, Nori Odi, is preparing Christmas cookies. Her industrious kitchen in Greenfield, New Hampshire, is filled with the aroma of rich maple. Nori lives here with her husband, David Gilmore, better known as “Rags.” Rags is a software engineer, a career that Nori once shared. But now it’s all about food, although the […]
A first-hand account of the December 2008 ice storm that left 400,000 New Hampshire households without power.
This summer, I was set to attend five weddings and the last of them was last weekend. Lori and Dave, sweet young friends who met on match.com. So many weddings, all of them different. Only one took place in a church — another was beside Buzzard’s Bay, another in a chateau, another was at the […]
About ten years ago, I began the process of writing “What There Was Not to Tell,” a book based on letters my parents exchanged during World War II. There were more than 2,000 letters and it took me a whole year just to read and organize the letters. These were not the usual letters of […]
Every year at this time, I drive down into the Connecticut River Valley, down through Northfield and Sunderland and Hadley, to buy my winter supply of onions and potatoes, plus winter squash and apples, and a few other things that will keep in my root cellar. This way, I don’t have to think about buying […]
On Wednesday I went up to Berlin, New Hampshire, to give a talk. I’ve been giving these talks for the New Hampshire Humanities Council for some time now, gigs that take me all over the state to libraries large and small as well as historical societies, some housed in big old town halls and some […]
Last week, I filled in at the front desk for Linda, who has been the trusty receptionist for Yankee for many years, the voice everyone has come to recognize when they call in. “Good morning, Yankee Publishing, how may I direct your call?” she intones hundreds of times daily. She also runs a little store […]
It is the end of summer, a strange thing to say since some of us feel there never was a summer this year. Just a long wet spring. And now we are about to celebrate Labor Day and school has already started. Because we have a number of lakes in this town, we have a […]
Harriet is six months old now, old enough to know better about some things. It would be obvious to most everyone who walked in the door that she is an alpha dog, whether they know the term or not. She dominates. She’s got to be first in line, ahead of the game, issuing the orders. […]
Teresa D’Angelo was 7 years old when the German army stormed her home village of Orsogna in Abruzzo, Italy, in 1943. She and her family fled, hiding in a cave for 13 days. Neighbors sneaked small pieces of food to them. “Just bits of bread,” she says now, standing in her recently renovated kitchen in […]
I love many things about this area, but one of my strongest pulls is from the legacy of art that underlies this and our surrounding towns. Beautiful landscape paintings seem like the very earth beneath our feet here, or at least this earth is the sustenance out of which these paintings have grown. Many artists […]
