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Living Madly: Small Things By Emilie-Noelle Provost Love and kindness are never wasted. It’s the sort of cliché you might find on a greeting card or in a self-help book. Most people I know tend to scoff at this type of sentimentality. It sounds sappy, too simplistic to have much…
Read More »Kisses – (PIP #19) By Louise Peloquin Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, bouquets of roses, colorful cards and the year’s gadgets are all exchanged on Valentine’s Day. So are kisses. L’Etoile published the following photo 80 years ago. Pure joy emanates from the low-definition image. A guitarist strums a tune.…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. The City of Newton’s shameful, illegal, and history-making 11-day teachers strike is over. Finally, Newton’s 12,000 school kids are back in class, where they belong. Those of us who have lived in Newton for a long time…
Read More »Tuesday night’s Lowell City Council meeting was largely uneventful, which is not necessarily a bad thing. There was the obligatory winter-time segment on potholes of which there are many. City Manager Tom Golden cited an enormous quantity of blacktop used by DPW workers to fill these holes which seem to…
Read More »The entry below is being crossed posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Master, Slave, Husband, Wife: an epic journey from slavery to freedom by Ilyon Woo is the story of Ellen Craft, a light-skinned enslaved woman and skilled seamstress, and her husband William, also enslaved and a skilled cabinet maker, and…
Read More »Over the past few months, I’ve written several blog posts about Lowell in 1926. Why that year? It’s partly because of the upcoming bicentennial of the city. Yes, “bicentennial” means 200 years ago, but when we observe that anniversary, it will also be important to understand what Lowell was like…
Read More »We have a new poem from one of our far-flung contributors, Tom Sexton in Alaska. Tom is a former Poet Laureate of Alaska and a permanent member of the Lowell High School Alumni Hall of Fame. The photographs below are by Kevin Harkins, made a few years ago when Tom…
Read More »News Briefs – (PIP #18) By Louise Peloquin Every day, the Prince Street linotype operators arouse L’Etoile’s five Mergenthalers (1) by tapping on their 90-character keyboards. The grand machines assemble matrices and spit out lines of hot metal to cast them into a single slug. These pieces are set to print newspaper…
Read More »At Tuesday night’s meeting, the Lowell City Council moved efficiently through a short agenda, completing the meeting in just 90 minutes. One thing that contributed to the meeting’s brevity was the presence of just five motion responses on the agenda. With 15 new motions passed the same night, simple math…
Read More »When Nothing Can Help By Malcolm Sharps One of the rare curiosities of Central European travel is to make the crossing from Hungary to Slovakia underground by way of the Dobsina-Aggtelek cave system, which in all is 21km in length. On my first visit to Aggtelek, I met with no such lucky opportunity;…
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