For weeks I had noted the increasing height of the plants shooting up from the untended compost pile in the corner of our backyard. With 20-plus years of accumulated organic matter, there was no telling what was growing. One recent morning when I let our 12-year old Yellow Lab Ivy…
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Located primarily in the northwest of County Clare, the Burren, is one of the world’s most unique landscapes. It means “great rock” in Irish (Boireann), and is dominated by thick successions of sedimentary rocks, often compared to a lunar landscape. In the following essay and series of photographs, Clare Mulvany take…
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Did Someone Say ‘Coffee’? By Jack McDonough Early in my married life I made coffee in a Proctor Silex which, if I’m not mistaken, consisted of an arrangement whereby the coffee flowed from one glass section to another, up or down, I don’t remember. I probably used Maxwell House coffee…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. No, Charlie, we do not need more Senators like Maine’s Susan Collins. We don’t even need Susan Collins. What we do need is to flip the Senate and deal responsibly with Covid-19 impacts, revitalize environmental standards to halt…
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A Different Kind of Dying By David Daniel Once a year, in late September, the town holds a drop-off at the DPW garage for used electronics. In advance of the event, notices appear in the community weekly newspaper, and on flyers affixed to telephone poles: UNWANTED TVS, COMPUTER MONITORS, PHONES…
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Dave Robinson is the author of the prodigious Sweeney in Effable: Five Books About Enjoying the View. This poem is from his new poetry manuscript, Nocturne in ‘White’ or ‘Yellow’. Enough by Dave Robinson A pair of reddish things unearthed beside green slabs of moss. Their wide threshold of…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. News of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death Friday hit hard, but it did not come as a surprise. She had been diagnosed with cancer five times since 1999 and fought back fiercely. When she succumbed, at the…
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The Kerouac Book River “The Kerouac Book River is inspired by the legendary Merrimack and Concord rivers, which run through the author’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. At the “source” of the river is the canon of first editions, beginning in 1950 with The Town and the City. Plentiful waters stir to…
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It was six months ago – Sunday, March 15, 2020 – that Governor Charlie Baker ordered schools, restaurants, and bars to close. Courthouses and much else closed too. Although the Covid-19 virus had been lurking in our consciousness for weeks before that, it was the mandated closings that brought home…
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