May 28th, 2012 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Education, Gardens and Gardening, General, Health, Shopping, Travel
The fragrance of Lithuania in May is lilac with a hint of lily-of-the-valley. It is best not to start a two-week vacation with a fall and a sprained ankle. It is worse to start a two-week vacation with a fall and a broken ankle, so count your blessings. Wherever you...
April 3rd, 2012 | Education, Gardens and Gardening
When we signed on the dotted line and acquired the key to our new home in 2005—a new house in a new development—the rock-studded clay and steep slopes of our lot offered a tabula rasa. The woods beyond, a non-tidal wetland protected by the state Department of Natural...
March 25th, 2012 | Education, Politics, Society at Large, the world and Mother Nature, Women
A few years back I found myself on camera with Regis Philbin on the quiz show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” A few days prior to that encounter, a factoid learned when I was sixteen drifted into my brain during a trivia-cramming-induced stupor. The information that...
March 1st, 2012 | Education, Memory, Women
We—my Dear One and I—attended the 121st Turnbull Lecture at Johns Hopkins University on the evening of February 28. The speaker, John Irwin, a senior faculty member in the Writing Seminars, has just published a book on the poetry of Hart Crane and his topic was...
May 22nd, 2010 | Education, General, Society at Large
As Michael Birnbaum writes in today’s Washington Post, “The Texas state school board gave final approval Friday to controversial social studies standards that minimize the separation of church and state and say that America is not a democracy but a ‘constitutional...
May 13th, 2010 | Education, General
No effort to accommodate an individual student goes unpunished. It’s true. A student when informed that the midterm will be on the first day back from Spring Break says that she will not be back from Switzerland yet. When a time for a make-up exam is scheduled, her...
