March 31st, 2021 | General, Shopping, Time Passes, transportation
It seems you now have to own a smart phone in order to buy a car. I guess it happened after we bought Ruby, our Toyota RAV4 in 2017 and replaced her with Garnet, another RAV4, on March 25, 2021. Four years ago, the cars seemed to function on their own. These days,...
January 2nd, 2021 | General, Holidays, music, the world and Mother Nature, Time Passes
I hate that “thud.” It always means a bird has mistaken the sliders—despite the raptor and leaf decals—as navigable space. The first thud we heard was a male red-bellied woodpecker only a few days after we had moved in. Then there was a goldfinch. Maybe a couple of...
December 4th, 2020 | Family, Gardens and Gardening, General, Holidays, Home Improvements, Society at Large, the world and Mother Nature, Time Passes
Is everyone still there? How to recount the year’s doings when we have done largely nothing? My favorite word–one of the three Oxford Languages chose for Word Of The Year–is “Blursday.” It perfectly describes the mush that time has become. Last year and...
October 13th, 2020 | Family, General, Holidays, Home Improvements, Politics, Time Passes
The flagstone patio at Nannie’s and Pop’s home in Hingham underlay the most wonderful wrought-iron furniture. The wheeled back legs of the chaises-longues allowed us to shift these monstrously heavy things relatively easily. Thick cushions in a floral fabric provided...
June 19th, 2019 | Family, Friends, General, Memory, Time Passes, Women
The Saturday of Reunion weekend marked fifty years to that June 14th when Emma Willard’s class of 1969 gathered in the greensward triangulated by the Chapel, the new Library and Weaver Science Building. It was hot and humid—we had worried that early morning...
May 29th, 2018 | Europe, General, literature and poetry, Memory, music, Politics, Popular Culture, Time Passes, transportation, Travel
According to the introduction, Mary McAuliffe produced “Twilight of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Picasso,Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends through the Great War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) as a sort of conclusion to...