January 22nd, 2014 | General, Memory, Pets, the world and Mother Nature, Travel
To experience this kind of luxury is to feel also the needling of guilt. Our cabin is made immaculate by our personal gremlin, the steward Erik, and someone hangs in a little linen bag several pages of articles from the New York Times (including the crossword puzzle)...
January 21st, 2014 | Gardens and Gardening, Genealogy, General, Health, the world and Mother Nature, Travel
“The engine drives the boat through the water,” Peter Warwick, the naval specialist on the cruise said. “With the sails up, she moves with the water.” The feeling, the difference, was evident even to a landlubber like me. Last night as we sailed toward St. Barts, a...
December 8th, 2013 | Gardens and Gardening, General, Holidays, Pets, the world and Mother Nature, Time Passes
Snow began to fall today sometime in later morning, near the end of Sunday Morning on CBS. Slate-gray skies and nippy air encouraged me to move briskly as I took my morning turn around the neighborhood. Newscasters solemnly itemized the cars wrecked, the trees and...
May 26th, 2013 | Gardens and Gardening, General, the world and Mother Nature
Such a beautiful Saturday in May, a brisk wind, temps in the sixties, irresistible gardening weather. What to do, what to do. Weeding. Pruning, General cleanup. We are coming up on the 8th anniversary of our moving in. In August of 2005 things looked pretty drab. The...
April 30th, 2013 | Gardens and Gardening, General, the world and Mother Nature
Genuine April weather it was, air soft from yesterday’s rain and sunlight occasionally reaching through the clouds. I was at my desk, focused on the needs of students desperate to improve grades who were finally willing to invite my tutelage on the last paper of the...
March 24th, 2013 | General, the world and Mother Nature, Travel, United States
My lips are chapped, the top of my shoulders faintly pink despite sensible shirts and the omnipresent wide-brimmed hat, and my mind is filled with constant contrast of an arid, spiny and primeval beauty locked in a death struggle with ugly human sprawl. Saguaro cacti,...