Autumn is the season that embraces reflection: thoughtful persons give thanks for their harvest even as they mourn the [human] losses that befell them during the time past. In the poems she reads for Trasna, works from her newly published collection Reshaping the Light, Irish writer Breda Joyce voices the…
Remembering the 1980 Winter Olympics By Dean Contover We woke up at 7:30 a.m., warmed up the van and left Waitsfield, Vermont, heading for the Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York. It was the last day of the XIII Olympic Games. The final games were going to be played…
Wormwood By Stephen O’Connor Just before noon, the cloud bank that had hunched over the city like a great gray cat skulked off to the west, giving way to light. Lowell always looked beautiful to me in the sun: red brick and gray stone under blue. Along the cobbled streets…
Marvelous Marvin Hagler and the Godfather By Charles Gargiulo My Uncle Arthur was more than an Uncle. He was my Godfather, which is like being picked to become Vice-President. You get an important sounding title but you never have to do anything unless the main guy dies or fails to…
Braiding the Sweetgrass in a Subaru Outback: Traveling with My Adventure Gang My Adventure Gang at an overnight campsite Road trips are a staple in American culture. And it’s not surprising that from a nation of immigrants came a nation of travelers. Here, Old World pilgrimages follow new paths: Route…
How a Kid from the East Coast Became a Diamondbacks Fan By Neil Miller When I was a kid growing up in Kingston, New York, in the 1950s, I chose my favorite sports teams by consulting a world atlas. My father didn’t have any strong allegiances—he cared more about golf…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Baron’s own blog. If you’re feeling down, don’t read today’s blog. After 35 years in journalism and still longer as an inveterate news junkie, I can barely read or watch the news these days. I delayed posting, hoping for a shred…
Susannah Martin: “Martyr of Superstition” by Juliet H. Mofford A marker at the end of North Martin Road in Amesbury notes: “Here stood the house of Susanna Martin. An honest, hardworking Christian woman accused of being a witch, tried, and executed at Salem, July 19, 1692. A Martyr of Superstition.” The…
Boarding School Blues: Chapter 22 By Louise Peloquin Ch. 22 The Inner Sanctum Sister Theophile’s office door was open when Blanche and Andy arrived. The headmistress’s inner sanctum was usually off limits. Rarely did anyone cross its threshold. The girls had noticed that Sister Gerald entered only when she was…
When English fur traders first ventured up the Merrimack River in the 1620s and 1630s, they encountered two established villages of the indigenous people who inhabited the region. The first village, known as Pawtucket, was located at the north side of the river at the falls. The other village, a…