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…
Cawley Stadium was alive with music and marching tonight as the Lowell High School band wrapped up Band Camp for 2010. All this week, student musicians have each day, even in the heaviest rain, worked hard to learn this year’s field show which will be performed at all LHS football…
Tomorrow morning (Saturday, August 28) at 9 a.m., Kim Zunino of the Lowell Historic Board will lead a tour of the School Street Cemetery. Surrounded by a stone wall in the midst of a century and a half old residential neighborhood, this cemetery is bounded by Branch, School and Middlesex…
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…
Some random observations on life in the city of Lowell as Fall approaches . . . Thursday is trash day in the Highlands. It used to be that early morning jogs turned into early morning sprints after coming face-to-tail with skunks foraging for food amongst the roadside Hefty bags. That…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…