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In September 2001, my wife and son for the first time picked grapes to make jelly from the venerable vine that crawls all over our modest backyard arbor. We had been coaxing the vine back to health for a couple of years before we got a large enough yield. In…
Read More »One of our regular readers, writer and poet Jacquelyn Malone, shows up today as a contributor. Jackie is living in Lowell for the second time around; she was here during the high-tech boom of the late ’70s and into the ’80s. I was introduced to her work in the ’80s…
Read More »Writing about the upcoming Bread & Roses Festival in Lawrence sent me to the vault for this poem written in the late 1970s, when I first encountered the political puppeteers and bakers in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Coincidentally for our blog community here, this poem was selected by Tom Sexton (before I knew who…
Read More »Mark your calendars for one of the authentic Merrimack Valley annual events, the Bread & Roses Festival in Lawrence, which is always produced on Labor Day. This year it’s Monday, September 6, 12 noon to 6 p.m. on the Campagnone Common in the middle of downtown. If you go, look…
Read More »Congratulations to the City Council and City Manager Lynch for having reached an agreement on compensation and a contract for the City Manager, who in this writer’s view has been tested and proved his value to the community in very challenging circumstances.
Read More »Our blogging colleague Dick Howe, Jr., who is also Register of Deeds for northern Middlesex County, is quoted at length in today’s SUN article about the decline in house sales in July when matched against sales a year ago in our region. Read the article here, and consider subscribing to the…
Read More »Don’t miss Lowell’s own Shakespeare in the Park experience this Sunday, Aug. 29, at 4 p.m., when the New England Shakespeare Festival brings its populist brand of the Bard’s work to Boarding House Park on French Street. The play is “Twelfth Night,” originally titled “Twelfe Night or What You Will,” a “madcap comedy…
Read More »Can an Environmental Attorney in Lowell, Massachusetts, Live and Work without a Car in the New Economy? By Matthew C. Donahue In early August of this year, the Donahue household was beset with a series of car crises. It was our own doing or undoing I should say. My office…
Read More »David Brooks of the NYTimes is back with another cerebral commentary today. He keeps digging to find out what’s really ailing the nation. I get the sense lately that he is deeply pained by the high level of toxicity in our civic culture and thinks that if he can describe the cause we…
Read More »I wrote this poem in the mid-’70s, when I was trying to find my way down the writing path. I published it in my first pamphlet (chapbook) of poems. It’s raining tonight, but we’ve had some fine summer days and sundowns this season. This is typical early-stage writing that comes…
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