To hear my punctual mother tell it, I was born two weeks early and that was the last time I was early for anything. A skillful procrastinator, I seem powerless to change. I hear the tick of the clock and I rage against that machine. But even as I curse the swing of the pendulum, […]
On Saturday night I went to a potluck at my friend Deb’s house. She loves Mardi Gras and almost never misses it but this year, for various reasons, she couldn’t get down to New Orleans. So she threw a party instead. Everyone was greeted at the door and bedecked with the famous beads of the […]
Make a Name for Yourself Some old-timers like to tell new residents not to speak at their first or (gulp) even first five Town Meetings. Nonsense, says Susan Clark. But picking your speaking spots is important. “There’s a trust that needs to develop,” she says. “If you just go in there and say, This is […]
We asked freelance writer and tea blogger Katrina Avila Munichiello to take a break from developing her new tea anthology to share her five favorite New England tea spots. She says that choosing just five was daunting, but her list of the best tea houses in New England includes “something for everyone.” 1. Clipper Merchant […]
Here are two remarkably similar stories about remarkably dissimilar works of art. Maryalice Huggins calls hers “a love story” as in Aesop’s Mirror: A Love Story; Erica Hirshler prefers “biography of a painting” for Sargent’s Daughters: Biography of a Painting. In fact, both are mysteries. The mystery is why certain works of art seize our […]
AUDIO: Captain Richard Phillips Andrea Phillips Interview The first December snow has come to Underhill, Vermont, and that makes Richard Phillips happy. “My kind of weather,” the 54-year-old Merchant Marine captain says. It’s been only eight months since Somali pirates took him from the helm of the Maersk Alabama, the American container ship they seized […]
At this time of year, when the ice is disappearing from the ponds and some fields are greening up, patches of snow or ice stay along the edges of shaded roads and in the north corners of fields. They’re a shock of white in a spring landscape. Sometimes, if it’s a warm day, I think […]
In the 1970s, when I first began paying attention to contemporary art, Pat Steir was one of an emerging cohort of artists that included, among others, Elizabeth Murray, Joan Snyder, Jennifer Bartlett and Judy Pfaff. Forty years later, Steir is a long established presence on the New York and international art scene, an accomplished artist […]
Harriet has been acting up lately. I wish I knew what triggers these rough patches. She turned one year old two weeks ago and I felt that she had finally become a dog, a well-mannered dog, an adult I could trust. She had been so good for so long, I was telling everyone we had […]
In this day and age when religious extremism threatens us both at home and abroad, it is both proper and necessary to be reminded that, at their benevolent hearts, most of the world’s religions say pretty much the same thing about the human condition. All religions are manifestations of a human will to believe in […]
I live in Cornish, New Hampshire, just up a dirt road from J. D. Salinger. Every year dozens of tourists and students, mostly guys, come up Dingleton Hill looking for J. D. Salinger’s home. It’s hard to imagine what they think they’ll find in an 90-year-old man who wants to be left alone. When I […]
Frankly, I had no idea what to expect when I drove down to Portsmouth yesterday to check out the Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art. I had only heard about it a week before from one of the 35 artists in Sacred and Profane: Eye of the Beholder, the museum’s current (through April 24) exhibition. I […]
