There was no Lowell City Council meeting this past week, so I’ll pick up where I left off in my last newsletter and share some more thoughts on elections and mail-in voting. In the aftermath of the September 3, 2024, primary election, people asked me, “Were you surprised by the…

Living Madly: Harvest Home By Emilie-Noelle Provost *This essay is dedicated to my sister Morgan who loves fairs so much she got married on the Ferris wheel at the Franklin Country Fair in Greenfield. **** When I was very young, my family used to go to the Marshfield Fair every…

Portraits Along the Way: 1976-2024 by Paul Marion. Reviewed by Richard Howe For more than a dozen years I’ve been leading tours of historic Lowell Cemetery. If it’s not raining, we average 80 to 100 people on each tour with many return visitors. Although Lowell Cemetery is a beautiful place,…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President (and convicted felon) Donald Trump put a smile on the face of anyone who has ever felt degraded or dismissed as weak, inconsequential or otherwise put…

The Lowell City Council met last Tuesday. The end of the agenda showed an executive session “to consider and discuss ongoing negotiations relative to Lupoli Companies LLC, public discussion of which could have a detrimental effect on the city’s position.” This would be the second executive session within a month…

On the Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, we found ourselves in a veterinary emergency room with Zoe, our 3-year-old labradoodle. All is well but the circumstances of our visit are worth sharing, so consider this a public service announcement. Here’s what happened: Sunday, September 1, 2024, was a beautiful…

Preparing for a Pandemic By Richard Howe (on September 3, 2009) For many years at the registry of deeds I wrote daily blog entries on real estate matters. But doing that daily is a difficult chore so often I would write about other things, especially world events that somehow affected…

Frequent contributor Steve O’Connor wrote the following essay in 2008 on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It seems appropriate to post it here once again: On September 11, 2001, I was teaching a class at Greater Lowell Tech as a few hundred miles south of us, men guided…

Worse? – (PIP #40) By Louise Peloquin      Delineating the role of the State in public health issues has fueled debate for decades. L’Etoile April 2, 1957 Statism worse than fluoridation Some time ago, while the battle about fluoridation was in full swing, a Chicago professional wrote to the Richmond…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. The nights are cool, but the days are warm enough to still qualify as summer. So here are two novels to tempt you. Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon is an historically inspired and riveting novel about Martha Ballard, a…