On a cold winter Saturday, I did something you can do at only one place on earth — climb aboard the last surviving wooden whaling ship. The 1841 square-rigged Charles W. Morgan has long been Mystic Seaport’s prime attraction, but nearly everyone who tramps along the deck or explores the dark recesses below does so […]
Verner Reed’s photographs preserve moments large and small of how New Englanders lived 60 years ago. When Verner Reed (1923–2006) came upon this group of children gazing into the window of a toy store along Boston’s Washington Street at Christmas in 1955, he captured, unmistakably, a little girl’s wonder and ever-hopeful yearning. He titled it […]
Once I believed that the holidays meant rituals of obligation: a Thanksgiving feast, and then with barely a breath in between, an almost obsessive need to bestow gifts. When my sons were young, I filled secret places with toys and gadgets, even making one final sweep on Christmas Eve for that “needed” stocking surprise. I […]
Doug Flutie, one of the most famous athletes to come from New England, has always credited his parents, Richard and Joan, with giving him the support and confidence to excel, no matter the obstacles. On Wednesday, November 18, 2015, Flutie’s father passed away from a heart attack after a period of poor health. An hour […]
Thousands of viewers tuned in to see Julia Child’s kitchen, which they saw as an extension of their own, and where they came to be instructed and entertained.
If the earth could speak, it might offer words of gratitude to New England for inspiring the most persuasive environmental voices the nation has ever known. Perhaps, as some fear, the tipping point of the earth’s warming has already been reached—but that hasn’t silenced the indefatigable Bill McKibben, ardent environmentalist and lucid writer, who from […]
We’d been climbing Katahdin in the near darkness, lighting our way from Chimney Pond over the boulder-strewn Saddle Trail by flashlight, then by the breaking dawn. On the plateau we paused. My companion, Irvin “Buzz” Caverly Jr., had seen this view hundreds of times. He didn’t gush about its beauty; his feelings ran deeper than […]
The Pan-Mass Challenge — The Ride That Won’t Stop There are people who possess a gift they don’t really know they have, until something unexpected happens, and their life takes a turn, and then their gift becomes the life itself. For instance, Billy Starr. When his mother died from melanoma, he asked himself, “How can […]
In New England there’s cold and then there’s “braggin’ cold,” and those who live in the North Country know what that difference feels like. But there’s one particular kind of person who knows all about “braggin’ wind”: the weather observers who live and work on the 6,288-foot summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Their […]
In the summer of 1983 the most famous child in the world was Samantha Smith, the 10-year-old girl from Maine who sent a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov: “My name is Samantha Smith … I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war …” Her subsequent journey to […]
I first saw Bill Staines perform at The Folkway in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It was 1979, and my sister, Anita, had come from Boston to visit me in Dublin, where I had just moved. Bill Staines was tall and lean; he wore a cowboy hat with jeans and boots, and his songs were like short […]
Lighthouses speak to us of lives both spare and romantic. Barely 200 feet from the shallows of Maine’s Long Sands Beach, the Cape Neddick Light Station perches so handsomely on its bony 2.8-acre nest of Nubble Island that we call it simply “Nubble Light.” Maine boasts more than 60 standing lighthouses. Nubble Light, Maine’s southernmost […]
