April 11th, 2020 | Gardens and Gardening, General, Politics, Society at Large
There has been a lot of retrospection in this time of COVID-19. Who if anyone at the top levels of government could have anticipated a pandemic and prepared the nation for such an event?[i] With China being so secretive and all, how could we have known the nature of...
July 27th, 2019 | Gardens and Gardening, General, literature and poetry, the world and Mother Nature
I cannot, of the life of me, get that pesky monarch to pause and pose for a picture. I have a pretty long lens on the camera and I don’t need to get very close, but still. Very irritating. I’ve never spent much time watching butterflies. I learned to differentiate...
June 25th, 2018 | Architecture and Design, Europe, Gardens and Gardening, General, literature and poetry, the world and Mother Nature, Travel, visual arts
Every time I pick up a Ross King book, it’s longer and weightier. Brunelleschi’s Dome was a little bit of a thing, perfect for reading on a transcontinental flight. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling was longer but then the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a better...
April 9th, 2018 | Family, Friends, Gardens and Gardening, General, literature and poetry, Memory, Time Passes
I read Sy Montgomery’s Soul of an Octopus (2016) and it permanently decreased my options on the sushi menu. The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood (Ballantine/Random House, 2006) may not permanently put me off pork, but it will make me...
April 2nd, 2018 | Gardens and Gardening, General, the world and Mother Nature
My maternal great-grandfather, Elwyn Greeley Preston Sr., established for his family a summer retreat on Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire. He acquired several contiguous parcels of land on Mooney Point and filled in a number of marshy areas to create firm...
January 12th, 2016 | Gardens and Gardening, General, Memory, Travel, United States, visual arts
Planes roar down from the west, above Balboa Park and I-5, to the runways at Lindbergh Field about every minute or so during the day. The first plane seemed loud but in a familiar way—I did, after all, live here in the 1980s. We woke to a pearly Monday sunrise and the...