The day of celebrating light dawns dark and cheerless. A cold east wind drives freezing mist up the valley, out of Caribou, across a half-dozen miles of frozen Aroostook potato field. In New Sweden the farmhouses are lit. On Jacobson Hill and Bondeson Corner, on Route 161 toward Jemtland, smoke rises from chimneys to greet […]
Jim Collins
Excerpt from a 1990 interview with Rene Rancourt, “Oh, Rene, Can You Sing,” Yankee Magazine, January 1990. It’s 6:25 in the press room behind Section 47 of the Boston Garden, 65 minutes before face-off. Hardened hockey-beat reporters sit on hard plastic chairs, sip soft drinks, and deal cards; others scribble self-consciously in their notebooks in […]
By the late 1960s, there hadn’t been wild turkeys in New Hampshire for more than a century. Then wildlife biologist Ted Walski came along.
New Hampshire
Swimming Holes | New England Summer Tradition
Children come of age in the cold,deep swimming holes of summer. I grew up in the village of Walpole, New Hampshire, a mile from a little swimming hole called “Hovey’s.” It was nothing more than a deep spot in a brook, really–probably not known to more than a handful of local families. But I can […]
New Hampshire
Celebrating the Dartmouth Winter Carnival
For more than 100 years, Dartmouth students in Hanover, NH have embraced winter in their own unique way with the Dartmouth Winter Carnival.
Massachusetts
Christmas Revels | The Sounding Joy
May our Christmas Revels not be ended–for their music is indeed ‘such stuff as dreams are made on.’
For Vermont’s state forestry commissioner, foliage season brings with it a colorful side gig.
Judy Squires met with other members of the Patriotic Exercises committee outside the Colt School at 6:45 a.m. They looked up through the drizzle at glowering skies and made the call to move the ceremony indoors. “Second time in 15 years,” she said. By the time Chief Marshal Tony Teixeira stepped off at 10:30 near […]
Travel
An Island of One’s Own
For a time in the 1980s, I lived in a small log cabin on a small island in one of the lakes scattered around Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire. The island tucked into the back of a shallow cove, less than a hundred feet from shore. From a distance–almost until you were right on […]
Bob King stands at the headworks of an old, 18-foot-high hemlock-and-stone crib dam spanning the Westfield River between Agawam and West Springfield, Massachusetts. It’s mid-April 2012, in the midst of what has been a historically warm spring following an unnaturally dry winter, and the only water coming over the dam shoots through two open sluiceways […]
For more than a century, Johnson Woolen Mills has kept New Englanders warm with its signature red-checked shirts and heavy-duty green trousers.
In 1909, a young New Hampshire farm girl named Lucy Wells looked forward all fall to the event of the season: the Christmas pageant at South Danbury Christian Church. Weeks ahead of time, she set about making presents by hand for her sister Caroline and her parents, and throughout November she practiced her part in […]