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 […]
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. […]
From Yankee Magazine September 1994 Writer Jack Kerouac died 25 years ago, down on his luck and estranged from the city of his birth, Lowell, Massachusetts. But his literary star is once more on the rise, and his hometown seems to have found a way to forgive him. Jack Kerouac was dead before I even […]
Have you been to a corn maze? Bring a sense of adventure and get ready to laugh, scream, and have fun at these New England fall farm features. Visit, for example, Marini Farms in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where an 8-acre, interactive Maze Quest opens with clues via 3-D glasses and text messages. The maze takes about […]
Producer/Director Ken Burns describes his work as “emotional archaeology.” For nearly 30 years, Burns has unearthed compelling, surprising, complex stories surrounding seemingly well-documented subjects. His newest film, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a six-part, 12-hour series, is scheduled to air on PBS stations beginning Sunday, September 27. We spoke with Burns in his office […]
It’s the church steeple that causes Jeff Folger, a.k.a. Jeff “Foliage,” Yankee‘s compulsive foliage blogger, to spin his red Silverado pickup truck around the town green of Brooklyn, Connecticut. The steeple is an unusual one, with a rectangular base giving way to a mansard-roof cupola covered in copper sheathing. And more to our purpose, it […]
We asked Carol Cambo, co-author of New England Camping (Avalon; $21.95), to choose the five best fall camping spots to pitch your tent or park your RV during the height of New England autumn color. Little Moose Management Unit Greenville Junction, ME Backcountry hikers in the mood to rough it may choose from a handful […]
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 […]
