The only thing people have been talking about these past few weeks is the weather. Not only has it been stormy but it’s been cold. In the past week, I’ve visited two neighbors who had hearth fires snapping in their living rooms. We all pulled up beside these fires as if it were October. I […]
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Speaking My Mind
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Snow Emergency
Excerpt from “Snow Emergency,” Yankee Magazine, January 1990. Snow has fallen, snow on snow: the words of the bleak midwinter carol fulfill themselves. The newspapers have been full of the snow, the newspapers thrown on lawns and porches have been buried under it. TV has warned and advised against it and hourly reports its progress. […]
The author learns the hard way how to drive a sled dog team.
Kindling a New Romance?
It should probably come as no surprise that I am a book lover. Every room in my house has shelves of books and stacks of various volumes, new and old, appear here and there since the bookshelves have long since run out of space. I am not unaware of the debate concerning the demise of […]
Classic: Seasons of Ice
Yankee classic from January 1981 People who live along inland waters in northern New England know there are really only two seasons: ice-in and ice-out. All else is but prelude and aftermath. A frozen lake draws us: we dare it early and we dare it late, probing the limits of a most delicate balance — […]
Moonrise On the Beach
On Friday I drove out to the end of Cape Cod to attend a memorial service for an old friend, Arturo Vivante who wrote beautiful short stories, some of them for this magazine. I had planned to visit with him this past April. We had picked a date but when I called a week ahead […]
International Picnics
I’ve been on the road for about a week, with more miles ahead of me. I sometimes tell people I don’t write for a living, I drive. I once calculated that I had driven a million miles in the course of my work for Yankee and that was some time ago. If I have to […]
Yankee classic from December 1995 If the tawdry, materialistic displays that too often mark a modern Christmas make you feel like the Grinch, then travel with me to Thompson, Connecticut. It is an evening in early December, and the Old Town Hall, at the northwestern edge of the five-acre Thompson Hill Common, is ready for […]
Rangeley, ME: An Angel in Rangeley
Yankee classic from December 1993 It’s a long road to Rangeley. Route 4 twists through miles of thickly forested land, rising and falling as it heads north from Augusta, and on winter nights snowbanks narrow the road, shining white in the headlights, tunneling through the darkness. Surrounded by the mountains and lakes of western Maine, […]
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 […]
Write It and They Will Come
The July/August issue of Yankee features one of the most complex stories we have done during my nearly 30 years here at Yankee. We titled it “25 People You Must See This Summer.” We put this together many months ago when the editors got together repeatedly to toss out the names of New Englanders we […]