If you’re the Easter Bunny, some years you just have to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Some Aprils, you have to deal with blizzards – and, thus, snow bunnies in Vermont. Sometimes in March, you find nothing but dust bunnies under the beds when you’re hiding the eggs. No matter what, you always […]
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Last month I spent a little time in Los Angeles traffic — and by little I mean “geologic” little, and by traffic I mean “Car Max” parking lot traffic. At one point, the Garmin GPS was telling me that I was 19 minutes from my destination for about an hour. Los Angeles, of course, is […]
Later this month — April 24 — Armenians around the world will pause to mourn the 1.5 million of our ancestors who were systematically annihilated by the Ottoman Empire in one of the 20th century’s first genocides. Under the violence and fog of the First World War, three out of every four Armenians living in […]
This seems to be the month when I am writing about the great women who raised me. Last week I wrote about my extraordinary and eccentric Aunt Rose Mary. Well, in another era, tomorrow would have marked the start of Annalee-Mas. Annalee-Mas was the season surrounding my mother Annalee’s birthday. Her birthday was not until […]
My Aunt Rose Mary has appeared in this column before. She was spotted most recently in a gorilla suit, planning to have a little fun and scare some kids on Halloween. Instead she ended up getting chased down the streets of Douglaston, New York by a mob of crazed sixth-graders – they didn’t realize it […]
Or, at least, the CHANCE to win free stuff. I discovered today that Goodreads and Doubleday right now are giving away free advance copies of CLOSE YOUR EYES, HOLD HANDS. Want the chance to win one? Click here. And, of course, you can learn all about the novel right there on Goodreads or on my […]
Lincoln, Vermont’s Tom Gadhue started sugaring on his own when he was 11 years old and living in Shelburne. “I got bit in the sixth grade, and this has been my love ever since,” he told me last week. He’s 54 now. “I had thirty buckets when I was a kid, and I was making […]
The Olympics are behind us. Someday – even this endless winter – the ice will melt. And when it does? There goes my next big idea for primetime TV: “America’s Got Curling.” Or, better still, “Celebrity Curling.” Sure, curling lacks the speed and grace of “Ice Dancing with the Stars.” (Tonight starring Bruce Dern and […]
One of my favorite short stories is Rebecca Rule’s “Yankee Curse.” Here is how it begins: “At School District Meeting, Miranda knits. May your neighbors steal from your wood pile, Mort Wallace. The points of her flexi-needle slide in and out of the heavy burgundy wool. May they incinerate their garbage in a barrel at […]
I lived in Florida when I was a teenager, so I know a little about living with a seashell-obsessed crazy person: My mother. We moved to Florida from Connecticut, and there was nothing that my mother thought could not be improved with seashells. I am not making up what I am about to tell you: […]
