Over the weekend, I held a writing workshop here at the house. Writers gathered in my living room, clutching notebooks and harboring stories. We ranged in age from 84 to 15, six women and one man. The 84-year-old woman wanted to share a story about her night-blooming cereus, a desert plant she’d rescued from the […]
connecticut
This seaside garden in Connecticut is an oasis for birds and butterflies. “I choose plants to feed the birds or attract the butterflies,” says Bunny O’Callahan, explaining the composition of her seaside garden in Connecticut. “Sunflowers really draw the goldfinches in. I like to float on my back in the pool and listen to them […]
To say Dick Pulsifer makes boats is to say Stradivari made fiddles. Every year for the past three decades, he has painstakingly crafted an average of three finely made small boats, plank by plank, at his modest workshop outside Brunswick. And these beguilingly simple boats — he’ll be completing #104 in 2008 — are treasured […]
Rhode Island
Rhode Island Foliage Driving Tour
I REALIZE THAT some travelers think of Rhode Island as a tangle of highway blocking easy access to somewhere else. I say give them a map and bid them Godspeed. I know this small and unruly state, and I can tell you for a fact that it affords more opportunities for easy enjoyment than any […]
Connecticut
Connecticut Foliage Driving Tour
THERE’S A PERFECTLY good reason why Nathan (“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”) Hale came from northeastern Connecticut. Settled a generation after the rest of New England’s colonizing along the coastline and the Connecticut River Valley, this area became home to many ex-Massachusetts families looking for more […]
Connecticut
California Comes to New Britain, Connecticut
New Britain Museum of American Art is an easily overlooked jewel in the crown of New England culture. I confess I had never been to New Britain, Connecticut, let alone to the New Britain Museum of American Art before stopping by last week on my way to a soccer tournament. New Britain on a Sunday […]
Excerpt from Yankee Magazine May 1983 On Memorial Day in Fairfield, Connecticut, when the parade and the speeches are over, Michael Daly drives along Long Island Sound and later heads north to towns where nobody knows him, and he does not come home until dark. “He really mourns,” his wife Maggie says. “Everybody else is […]
Magazine
Eddie Perez: Mayor of Hartford
From Yankee Magazine June 2006 The trees and shrubs of Bushnell Park in Hartford, including a Chinese mahogany, are in full bloom in June. Green fields slope up to the gold-domed Connecticut capitol, a child’s fairy-tale confection of marble and granite. On a 1914 carousel, children straddle antique hand-painted horses, striving for the brass ring. […]
An elite New England prep school might not be the place you’d expect to find one of the wild men of contemporary American art having a show, but then few if any prep schools have a museum to match Phillips Academy’s Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Fewer still have such illustrious artist […]
Within a few minutes after turning off Connecticut’s Route 9, which follows along the Connecticut River south of Hartford, we knew we’d taken the wrong exit. With the sun rising directly in our eyes, we couldn’t read the signs properly. Our destination was a horse farm in East Haddam. We’d been corresponding with the owners, […]
New England
Hiking and Biking: 6 destinations
Connecticut Ten Mile Hill, Kent. In the Litchfield Hills, the Appalachian Trail weaves through deep forests. Start at Bull’s Bridge Falls. From here, the trail rises above the water before descending to Ten Mile Gorge, where the Housatonic and Ten Mile rivers merge. From here, switchbacks climb steadily to the crest of Ten Mile Hill, […]
New Hampshire
5 Beaches and a Seaside Grand Hotel
Connecticut Hammonasset Beach State Park Boasting 900 acres, Hammonasset is two miles of sandy beach with mild ocean temperatures (we’ve enjoyed the sea there well into September) and a light surf, perfect for swimming, hiking, and surfcasting. More than 550 well-maintained campsites make for an inexpensive beach vacation when the big resort hotels are overflowing. […]