This piece will be perforce much shorter than my usual exhalation. I’m writing it flat on my back in a hospital in Berlin, Vt. My lovely daughter...
Our Christmas was muted; New Year’s has been sterilized, driven online or canceled; and winter appears to be clamping down upon us at last. Time to...
“The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark outside already.”We hear a lot of grousing, as the winter solstice approaches...
During my first year at a boarding school where all the students worked about 10 hours a week, I was assigned menial labor in the barns. Perversely...
It was a stage set by Dickens: the best of time, the worst of times. Caught in the clutches of what I’d now call an aggressive lack of direction...
The alarm of my iPhone (a recent upgrade of my technical abilities) goes off at 6, whether or not I need to get up. Last evening I changed its...
The hammer of autumn darkness and the return to “standard time” seemed to fall harder than usual this past week. The reason is probably that...
I’m sitting in my snug office, wearing fleece (damned if I’ll activate the thermostats yet!), listening to a cold rain dripping from the eaves, and...
Young people, Aristotle noted in Rhetoric, ca. 400 B.C., “are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced...
We had an overnight guest coming, which set the housekeeping staff (me) a-humming. I laundered the sheets and pillowcases in the guest room, hung a...
Monday this week, like the two days before it, was gray and drizzly. It was also the Feast of St. Francis, that cheerful, optimistic 13th-century...
As surely as sugaring presages the advent of spring, September slides into October with its usual seasonal observances: hillsides and mountains...