To experience this kind of luxury is to feel also the needling of guilt. Our…
Down to New England 5: Monuments, Memorials and Memories
This was the branch that most frightened me, the one most perfectly positioned to do irreparable harm to the monument. Lower and smaller branches had already been removed, opening space around the slender column surmounted by its neoclassical urn. Four of us—two on...
Down to New England 3: Jerry and Doffy
When last I saw him, the blue and lavender and green plaid cotton shirt Jerry was wearing made his bleached-denim eyes bright. The reason to travel to Damariscotta, Maine, was to have more time with Jerry before he loses his way in Time, to have dinner with Doffy and...
Elegy
When I was about twelve or thirteen, I read Sterling North’s Rascal, a memoir of a year during World War One and the raising of a baby raccoon. North was much the youngest of four siblings; his sister Theodora was the practical member of the family and the one who...
Back in the Garden
The ground is soggy, the sun is bright and the wind whips up now and then. Although there are patches of snow and ice here and there, there is no sense of winter, only the certainty of spring. The garden is a wreck. There is so much dead foliage, not just the detritus...