Last week, my good friend’s Facebook status said she spent three days in the athletes’ dorms at the US Olympic/Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Erin is the executive director of Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sports (VASS). VASS is a non-profit organization that provides sports and recreational opportunities to individuals with disabilities/handicaps, regardless of their […]
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 […]
Home Tips: Fall Chore Shortcuts 1. Clean painted woodwork with a solution of 1/2 cup white vinegar, 1 cup ammonia, 1/4 cup baking soda, and 1 gallon of lukewarm water. No rinsing is necessary with this solution. 2. Clean vinyl shower curtains without taking them down by wiping them with a sponge dampened with white […]
Welcome to the September 2009 edition of Jud’s New England Journal, the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, the Editor-in-Chief of Yankee Magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, N.H. Some Things We Can Count on Not to Change It’s not quite as easy to come up with unchanging things as we first thought… We […]
Yankee Classic from Mysterious New England, 1971 Here is a tragedy so heinous, a mystery so unfathomable, an abduction so strange, as to cause all who hear the tale to look askance, and shake their heads. Have you ever tramped the trails leading from the White Mountains down onto the eastern bank of the Connecticut […]
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 […]
It was the summer of 1953. Ernest F. Fetske, a prominent naval architect from New York, and his wife, Bettina, were taking a load of bricks in their boat out to their vacation home on five-acre Brockway Island in Essex, Connecticut. They’d been spending weekends there since purchasing it in the early 1940s. Folks around […]
A father, a son, and a timeless shared passion for fly-fishing on the Deerfield River.
I drove out on snowy spring days or in the dark evenings of early summer, to Cornwall and Salisbury and New Haven and Shoreham and Lincoln. I took off my boots in the houses of strangers and asked that they trust this place I might create, which I did not know how to create. I […]
I’m distressed that some of the plants in my perennial garden are really overgrown and crowded. What should I do? — J. K., Wellesley, MA Fall is an excellent time to transplant perennials such as hosta, daylily, peony, iris, and a multitude of others that you can readily divide. By autumn most plants have attained […]
Anais Mitchell is possibly the most beguiling farmer’s daughter in Vermont. Her father has raised sheep and taught English at Middlebury College since the ’80s, so she was brought up loving both land and letters. As a teen she found her voice in folk music and has since made a career crafting perfect poems that, […]
