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...
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...
December 31st, 2017 | General, Politics, social media, Time Passes
The news media—certainly the “fake news” media from which I get most of my information—are weighty with analysis this morning, the Sunday morning of New Year’s Eve 2017. Trump has been president of the United States of America for just under twelve months. On every...