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Living Madly: Loneliness, Third Places, and The Back Table By Emilie-Noelle Provost Much has been written about the current “loneliness epidemic.” For the last fifteen or so years, people everywhere have become increasingly isolated from one another, a problem both exacerbated and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. People are spending…

Memories of Music in Lowell By Leo Racicot Our mother’s mother, Adele, had the most beautiful, high, clear soprano. She loved to sing. I have only to close my eyes, and I can still hear Come, Come, Come to the Wildwood, I Come to the Garden Alone and Alexander’s Ragtime…

Prom Time – (PIP #69) By Louise Peloquin It’s that time of year again – prom time. Who am I goin’ with? What if I go with a bunch of BFF’s? What if I go alone? What am I gonna to wear – vintage, gothic, random? Are proms still a…

The enrty below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Time of the Child by Niall Williams returns us to the setting for his last novel, This is Happiness. We’re deposited back in the rural Irish village of Faha, where the men work hard and douse end-of-workday frustrations at the local…

The most important portion of Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting emerged from an innocuous agenda item: The City Manager notifying the council that a member of one of the city’s many volunteer-staffed boards had resigned. The board involved was the city’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Committee and the…

A Journey By Kevin Cavanaugh Upon a winged horse I fly Above the trees below the sky To dwell a fleeting moment with the wind To shoot the breeze and then rescind Mindless is the path I take Mindless be or mindless make Escape not life for that is death…

The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) lived in the Essex County portion of the Merrimack Valley for most of his life, but he did live in Lowell in 1844-45 where he served as the editor of the Middlesex Standard, an abolitionist newspaper. As a professional writer, Whittier recorded his…

Voyages By Jim Provencher  1  Old Orchard Beach  In the last place, where the river enters the sea, where it ripples into a larger whole, my mother lived out her final days, wandering sea-oat anchored dunes, wading the sea-edge, gathering glinting shells that caught her eye. 2  Then, Back When…

Housing, Parking and Roadwork in 1924 Lowell – (PIP #68) By Louise Peloquin City Hall and municipal administration offices are hives where worker bees coordinate their efforts to act for the benefit of the community. Meetings are held. Commissions are created. Projects are elaborated. Sometimes however, the hives get of…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey was a very different read for me. I had read a couple of versions of The Odyssey in my younger life. But her fresh translation of Homer came highly recommended, and I decided to give it…