Photos & Words
In recent months, I have been engaged in some collaborative house-sitting at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House in Hartford, Connecticut. Harriet herself is on extended vacation. She occasionally drops us a line from afar, in...
A few years after publishing her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a brief essay celebrating a magnificent old oak tree she was fond of. She mused: “I sometimes...
The wee hours, a few days before Thanksgiving. Done with sleeping, done with dreaming, I’m standing in my library watching shadows play along the bookshelves. What to do? A famous philosopher once heard a...
It was touch and go for a while, but the lilacs are finally blooming, the ovenbird has resumed his mid-wood teachings, and the cemetery groundskeeper is once again out there on his riding mower,...
One June day some years ago I made a trip to Vermont to visit The Robert Frost House Museum. It’s just up the road from Shirley Jackson’s Hill House and isn’t haunted in the...
When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, I spent a lot of time dreaming of escape to the Land of Rip Van Winkle. I didn’t have a car or any easy...
Monday, May 3rd, 1965. I’m seven years old, running home from school with my chums. I can’t see their faces anymore—they appear shrouded as if in mist—but I know they are there. We’re all...
A sunny day in spring, the air redolent of fragrant promise. Blue sky overhead put me into the mood to buy a new lilac shrub for the yard, so I drove down the mountain...
A long time ago I lived alone in a rustic cabin located well “off the grid” in in the faraway California woods. It was a sweet spot on the western slope of the Sierra...
I wanted to try my hand at writing a dog story. First, I needed to get a dog. What kind of dog? A collie. But why stop there? I told my wife that we...
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