In my adult life, I’ve had three memorable dogs—Gorm, Dune, and Mayday. They all lived long lives, for dogs. When Dune came into that twilight time, her warm brown eyes clouded into a strange blue and her hearing all but lost, I despaired of losing her. When my husband, Paul, died, she refused to come […]
I’ve gardened from a very young age, starting when I was probably 6 or 7, following my father around, pushing seeds into his tilled earth–marigolds and zinnias, cucumbers and string beans, the easy ones. He separated a special area of his garden, marked with twine and small stakes. My garden. My father knew a lot […]
This delicious recipe for lobster chowder comes from a real Maine lobsterman, and yields a rosy red broth that’s loaded with lobster chunks and potatoes.
Last year, I accomplished something I didn’t think possible: I cleaned out my barn. Rolling open the big doors revealed a great hodgepodge of objects from the past, files from stories I’d written over the years, family papers, and things I think I might need or might fix someday. Lacking a compelling reason, one can […]
The rise of the fields’ soft curves, the seasons of the hay, the broad reach of the old apple trees, the long-blooming rosebush on the split-rail fence, the in-your-face view of Mount Monadnock, the brilliance of the night sky … These are just some of the aspects of the beauty that brought me here. It […]
At Cogswell’s Grant in Essex, Massachusetts, Caroline Craig’s cooking stirs memories of a life lived in service to a fabled family and their historic property. One day in 1966, Al and Caroline Craig walked down the road to pick strawberries at Cogswell’s Grant, a 1600s-era farm, with early-18th-century buildings, at the end of Spring Street […]
For the past dozen or so years, I’ve sung in the choir of our local church. Each Sunday, we lead the congregation in hymns and sing an anthem, something by Brahms or Rutter. With a clock tower, a weathervane, and Ionic columns, the Dublin Community Church is a classic 19th-century New England house of worship, […]
Jessie Grearson grew up in Meriden, a little village in western New Hampshire. Her mother, she says, made everything from scratch. “I used to crave store-bought cookies,” she quips. So she learned the basics of good cooking from her mother and then went off to Williams College in the Berkshires, followed by grad school at […]
Shelley Osborne is sitting at the kitchen table in her well-appointed loft in a refashioned brick mill beside the Nubanusit River in West Peterborough, New Hampshire. On her shelves are small groups of English china, teapots, creamers, willowware and yellowware, treasures collected from chapters of her eclectic life. “Growing up, I lived in England, and […]
On Christmas Day I usually have a crowd here–friends, neighbors, and occasionally a cousin or two, my idea of family. Everyone contributes to the feast, and there’s usually a heap of good food, which last year included smoked salmon, ham, a frittata, a raisin braid, orange rolls, and an impressive trifle. Folks start arriving around […]
When Ron Morin wakes up in the morning, he often has the menu for that night’s dinner already set. He dreams his recipes and then sets out to create the evening’s meal–maybe shiitake mushrooms and eggplant in Chinese brown sauce, or haddock poached in curried almond milk. Ron and his wife, Lisa Kaplan, live in […]
Mary Blenk’s wild-blueberry pie is so good that it’s a regular prizewinner at contests around the country.
