November 8th, 2011 | Genealogy, General, Travel
So much of this trip has been about discovering a grandfather who was never a part of my memory. David Sanford Cutler died suddenly from what may have been a staph infection in 1926. His sons Calvin (my father) and David were only two and four years old...
November 8th, 2011 | General, Travel
The change in terrain is almost overwhelming. Gone are those rolling hills of Lorraine and the flat expanse of the Pas-de-Calais. Here the Grand Morin winds through a deep valley, a location appreciated by neolithic tribes in the millennia BCE, centuries of farmers...
November 6th, 2011 | General, Travel
In 1917, Canadian troops, with extraordinary valor and grotesque losses, took ground held by Germans since 1914. Vimy is now an enormous park; the terrain, grassy and green, retains the topography created by shellfire and the craters left my mines exploded in tunnels...
November 4th, 2011 | General, Travel
What do you do with an old concrete building and barren land in the industrial outskirts of a gracious grande-dame of a city like Arras? Turn it into a giant and sneakily educational playground, of course! And what a playground Cité Nature is! The conversion...
November 3rd, 2011 | General, Travel
The skies wept over Ypres and Passchendaele. This was the place that my Dear One felt most drawn to. On the drive up, he read me key passages from Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields. I had spent little time studying that corner of the Front. I had read The Danger Tree...
