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By WILLEM LANGE

Our cab arrived at 4:40 a.m. on the dot and deposited us at the entrance to United Airlines about 5:30. Check-in was amazingly easy, and the trek to our gate likewise. We took off from Logan also on the dot — it seems to be true that the earlier in...

By WILLEM LANGE

There are several good features of my current racket of working with a television program rooted in the outdoors. I get to visit places I’d never have been able to get to myself, or, in some cases, even heard of. I get to meet and interview some very interesting people. And I learn stuff the best way possible: by being immersed in it with the guidance of experts who live it.

By WILLEM LANGE

Years ago, the national anti-tobacco campaign slowly and with little apparent effect chipped away at Americans’ deadly addiction. That battle is far from over, but the results have been significant.

By WILLEM LANGE

In midsummer, the sun works its way around to the back of the house and a little before sunset floods the back porch with light and heat. This evening is no exception. Hot as it is, though, I know I’ll miss it when in a few weeks it slips out of sight around the northwest corner of the house for another 11 months.

By WILLEM LANGE

Donald Trump is a tough target for journalists and commentators to hit. Like a high-flying bomber that spews metallic chaff out its back end to confuse the radar of missiles, he so consistently floods the news cycles with outrages that by the time anyone has the chance to report, comment on or fact-check each one, there’s another one coming, and the current news is passé, yesterday and seemingly irrelevant.

By WILLEM LANGE

Making hay while the sun shines and the roads are free of slippery impediments to travel, I did a little extra driving this past weekend. In the process, I got a better-than-usual view of my beloved country, on the car radio, passing through small towns, on my cell phone, and from some old friends. Kiki, as constant a companion as is my phone, went everywhere with me. The moon roof on my little hybrid makes it possible to leave her in the car for a short while if I have to be away.

By WILLEM LANGE

On Sunday mornings of the weekends when Bea drives up from Nahant, if the weather is warm and pleasant, we put the top down on the roadster, assure Kiki we won’t be gone long, and tool leisurely downstream along the Winooski River to Middlesex for coffee and a pastry at Red Hen Bakery. It’s a clean, well-lighted place, usually pretty busy on Sunday mornings with a mixture of locals, tourists and transplants like me. The signs on the chalkboards and over the doors and windows, as well as the posted instructions for proper disposal of cups, dishes, and trash, signal clearly that if the bakery were larger and better known, it would be a prime target for the Trump administration. It pretty much defines “woke.”

By WILLEM LANGE

My kid was mountain biking on a hill near his home in Arkansas and realized he’d lost his cell phone out of his pocket somewhere along the trail. Without his phone, he was incommunicado, but another rider lent him his. He called home, his wife hit “Find Will’s phone” on her phone, and she was able to send him a map showing the exact spot in the woods where the mislaid phone lay.

By WILLEM LANGE

My tour group’s transfer from Salzburg to Vienna was nothing if not leisurely. Our bus first took us to the gigantic abbey at Melk, a typically imperialistic pile of stone decorated with heroic figures. Thence we boarded the “Austria,” a cruise boat that took us several miles downriver to a landing where we reunited with our bus. Both riverbanks were lined with vineyards, which got me remembering one of my favorite concierges and his disdain for German wines.

By WILLEM LANGE

It’s difficult to complain about the length of a flight to Europe when you consider what our ancestors went through to get here. Their tears at the sight of the Statue of Liberty weren’t just from inspiration; they were overjoyed to get off that boat.

By WILLEM LANGE

My oldest child, Virginia, turned 65 this past week. This sort of thing usually evokes, on social media, the comment, “Goodness! Where did the time go?” I shall avoid that; I know perfectly well where the time has gone since that sunny spring day in Keene Valley, New York, with robins hopping on the green lawn among the dying snowbanks. It’s been a long, adventurous, sometimes slogging career from there to here (you may read “career” in any sense of the word you like).

By WILLEM LANGE

Of all the numskull, hammer-headed, misguided, ham-handed, tin-eared ideas floated by our current president (and there have been many, by my count), the one about annexing Canada as a 51st state has got to rank in the top 10 world-wide. His supporters claim he was just joking. If that’s so, it’s the first joke I’ve ever heard him crack. Plus, the Canadians ain’t laughing. Pretty much in response and against heavy odds, they elected another Liberal, a former banker whose response to Trump’s casual condescension has been the classic gesture often seen in heavy traffic.

By WILLEM LANGE

The tips of my tamaracks are starting to turn green, the coltsfoot is in bloom, and a phoebe is singing in the brook bed below the kitchen. The sun is out, and if the thermometer goes up another five degrees, I’ll fire up old Helga (my 27-year-old silver BMW roadster) and let her out of the barn for her first run of 2025. In spite of the strong snow shower of last week, it’s probably safe to say that spring appears to be here.

By WILLEM LANGE

Both my friend Bea and I have functioning automobiles, which is fortunate, because we live (when you factor in stops for coffee, washroom, or gasoline) about four hours apart. We pretty much trade weekends for travel, and get together about twice a month. She’s still teaching, so vacations are a pretty big deal.

By WILLEM LANGE

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. — Thomas Paine

By WILLEM LANGE

Keeping up with the shenanigans of the Trump administration is like the old kids’ game of setting three frogs on a table and trying to stop them from jumping. As soon as you think you’ve got one outrage pegged, another pops up in a spot you didn’t expect.

By WILLEM LANGE

Some years ago my wife, my younger daughter, Martha, and I stopped for the night in the ancient town of Nettuno, on the west coast of Italy. It happened to be the feast day of La Madonna delle Grazie, a major festival featuring carnival rides, various team competitions and games of chance along the esplanade, followed by a parading of the enthroned Madonna by hundreds of costumed celebrants. (It was also the scene of a bizarre incident in which an Italian cop, who wouldn’t let me drive to our hotel because of temporary one-way signs, allowed me to back up two blocks instead. But that’s another story.)

By WILLEM LANGE

Years ago, during my days as a remodeling contractor, we often had to demolish an existing structure, a wall, or plaster and lath in order to begin to work our magic. I asked my guys to list such labor on their time cards as “R&T” — Ripping and Tearing — and couldn’t help but notice that the youngsters went at it with incredible gusto, often with sledge hammers and lots of noise and dust. My tools of choice were usually just a claw hammer and a small “flat bar,” which I found more effective and a lot less noisy and dangerous. My counsel to my men was often, “Pretend you’re a 70-year-old man and work more gently.” First thing I knew, I was that 70-year-old man, and began to ease myself out of a business that I really had enjoyed.

By WILLEM LANGE

The week started off at midnight Friday morning with a full lunar eclipse. A thick, rain-filled warm front followed right behind, and the snow began receding from my yard. Sugarmakers began posting steam-filled photographs of their operations, which will be followed shortly by more photos of two-wheel-drive cars mired up to their axles on country roads. A cardinal sang lustily from a tree down in the brook bed below my house. And best of all, it’s spring break for universities, so I’ve got company.

By WILLEM LANGE

The year 1985 has often moved me to invoke Shakespeare: “So fair and foul a year I have not seen.” But let’s focus on just the fair for the next few minutes.

By WILLEM LANGE

The events of this past weekend in the Mad River Valley of Vermont highlighted a well-known, but rarely discussed, feature of Washingon, D.C., politics: the tin ear. I like to call it the imperial ear. It listens, but doesn’t hear. Instead, it assumes. And last weekend, it assumed wrong.