Opening night is right around the corner

We’re coming up on “hell week” at our house, and I’m trying to stay relaxed about it. Since the beginning of January, Douglas has been rehearsing almost every Saturday and Sunday, all day, for the upcoming production of “Fiddler on the Roof” at the New Surry Theater in Blue Hill. The show opens next Friday, […]

Navigating April showers and tax time in a new(ish) marriage

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” So begins T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem, “The Wasteland,” which I studied in both high school and college and still barely begin to understand. What I understand better is that, around these parts, […]

Week after week, this old gift delivers new insights

My former mother-in-law, Mary Louise Haskell, bought me a subscription to The New Yorker for my 30th birthday and renewed it faithfully every year afterward. Each week it arrived, like clockwork, through my nursing school education, half a dozen relocations, ups and downs in my marriage to her son, the raising of our two boys, […]

The arrival of the seed catalog signals spring

  I have pretty much given up making New Year’s resolutions. I’m not very good at keeping them, so I wind up feeling guilty and inadequate, which sort of defeats the purpose. But the annual garden resolution is different. That opportunity announces itself each February with the arrival in my mailbox of the dreamy new […]

Hunkering down with gratitude and smelts

I don’t mean to be tedious, but our serial snowstorms last weekend found me feeling, once again, so grateful. Unlike many rural Mainers, Douglas and I live in a warm, weather-tight house within just a few miles of critical conveniences like a grocery store, a gas station and an ambulance service. We have caring neighbors […]