May 17th, 2010 | General, the world and Mother Nature
Heavens, but the bluebirds are dumb. We love our little azure bits of bliss, and go to great lengths to provide them with their favorite flavors of suet. They flutter berylline around the feeders, uncertain how to cling and unwilling to reach through the mesh to the...
May 13th, 2010 | Education, General
No effort to accommodate an individual student goes unpunished. It’s true. A student when informed that the midterm will be on the first day back from Spring Break says that she will not be back from Switzerland yet. When a time for a make-up exam is scheduled, her...
March 13th, 2010 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, General
Yesterday’s moisting turned into today’s steady downpour—a good thing as I need to correct essays and grade quizzes. In the woods, a muddy stream undulates through the woods, hanging a sharp left to pass under the fallen tree that provided deer shelter during the...
February 20th, 2010 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, General
My Dear One decided to bake. I noticed because there were a couple of plastic buckets left over from some construction job in the oven—a sure sign of yeast at work. For whatever reason—cabin fever, a short supply of good rye bread in the freezer, the sudden urge to...
February 17th, 2010 | General
The four-dozen roses bought from the expensive on-line purveyor arrived promptly on Thursday, February 4 as promised. They were quickly extracted with their sweet attar from the protective packaging and ice packs; there was a small amount of extra greenery; the red...
February 10th, 2010 | General, the world and Mother Nature
It is not that there is nothing to do; indeed, there is far too much that needs to be done. I need to reconfigure class schedules to deal with days lost to snow, to write lectures for classes starting in less than two weeks, to sort through messes on tables and boxes...
February 8th, 2010 | General
Snow came down for twenty-four hours. The storm started around two-thirty or quarter to three On February 5. At three-oh-five on February 6, I put the chicken in the oven to roast. It may have been the changed quality of the light that caught my eye: the air was...
February 5th, 2010 | General
7:10 am There is a winter storm warning for central Maryland in effect from ten a.m. today through ten p.m. tomorrow. Meteorologists predict two to four inches of snow by tonight, eighteen to twenty-four inches in all, and blizzard conditions. Schools throughout the...
February 3rd, 2010 | General
The weather report for Saturday, our wedding day, is ominous. It snowed steadily yesterday afternoon, a sifting of silver against the pewter sky. Before I went to bed I peered out the sidelights of the front door. All was white, all was soft in the bright lamplight....
January 28th, 2010 | General
A great deal is made about the wedding vows. As an erstwhile Episcopalian, I find the words from the 1662 Church of England Book of Common Prayer poetic. There is something very satisfying in that grand finale: “With this Ring I thee wed, with my Body I thee worship,...
