In 1962 Waine Morse decided to build a make-believe store beside his vegetable garden in Greenfield, MA, to house his burgeoning collection of Americana. He couldn’t stop. Excerpt from “’The Man Who Build a Town in His Backyard,” Yankee Magazine, December 1989. It didn’t start out to be like this, a whole village, a toy […]
Edie Clark
Magazine
Portsmouth, RI: The Tin Can Man
Yankee classic from January/February 2001 In a small, white house on a side street off a side street in the seaside town of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, there lives a village so lightweight a child could pick it up and carry it away, but strong enough to lift the weight of the world off the shoulders […]
Magazine
The Dear Old Computer
Yesterday my computer crashed. I hate that sentence and all the possibilities that it implies. I was sending photographs on e-mail to a magazine I occasionally work for and, whether it was this actual act or just coincidence makes no matter, the fact is that the computer threw up a dark screen and refused to […]
Magazine
The Fox Comes Out
A few years ago, I wrote a short story I titled The Fox. It is about a young woman who is struggling to recover from the death of her husband. She works a mind-numbing job and comes home each night to an empty house. One hot summer evening, a fox wanders into her yard. The […]
Magazine
Blue Heaven
On hot mornings like this one, I start early when it’s still (relatively) cool. Last weekend, I planted the vegetable garden, and later, morning glories on the porch posts. I need to keep these well watered, at least for their first week, and more if the heat continues. I only have one faucet, which is […]
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Dancing in the Dark | Mary’s Farm
Hot summer nights make the young restless, and now that I’m older, I wonder why. I was once guilty of pumpkin smashing and a few pranks worse than that, so it’s not that I don’t understand. But when I think back to such a time, I truly can hardly believe that I did those things, […]
Over the weekend, I held a writing workshop here at the house. Writers gathered in my living room, clutching notebooks and harboring stories. We ranged in age from 84 to 15, six women and one man. The 84-year-old woman wanted to share a story about her night-blooming cereus, a desert plant she’d rescued from the […]
Magazine
African Slaves in Portsmouth
Excerpt from Yankee Magazine February 1999 It is 1968, and in the dark back room of St. John’s Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a young black woman is seated at a small table, bent over church records. This is not the beginning of Valerie Cunningham’ s search, but it is the beginning of her success. […]
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The Digs | Mary’s Farm
On clear days, artists sometimes come up here to try to capture this view, a panorama of fields, hills, and mountain. I welcome the sight of an easel set up on the hillside, as I often wake up to a scene of so much beauty that I wish I knew how to paint. Recently, one […]
In her small, Alpine-style kitchen away from the busy streets of Center Conway, New Hampshire, Jan Duprey, a small woman with a thick braid of dark hair pulled off her face, draws a pan of roasted squash seeds out of her oven. A hot, nutty fragrance wafts into the room. “I do this all the […]
Roxanne Quimby’s goal is to preserve the landscape of Maine’s North Woods forever, but controversy has been sparked by those who want to retain use of that land. In the early summer of 1975, 24-year-old Roxanne Quimby arrived in northern Maine, having driven across the country with her boyfriend, looking for a place to homestead. […]
When Courtney Hunter sees her friends toss out leftovers, she shudders. “This is the best part!” she cries. Courtney takes leftovers to a new high. Her friends call her cooking specialty “Yankee chic.” Today, in her efficient Jamestown, Rhode Island, kitchen, Courtney is working with the pot roast she made for dinner the night before. […]