a wren solos where the offering of daybreak brightens the road and as the day returns to heat the bird’s music is sewn into the branches lik...

Video from the school shooting in Georgia was playing with the sound off on the TV behind the counter at the convenience mart. “Have a good ...

Because of backyard fledglings, because of ferals and snakes and ticks, I keep my cat inside, where his cupped ears are tuned not to the scu...

That fall my friend told me that Marilyn had been size sixteen, Fifties’ curves too large for the Eighties in Boston. There bone-thin women ...

Another prison mark, like the teardrop and the clock, it can weave over elbow, knee, nape of neck, belly, back. It might be nothing more tha...

The flight attendant read through the entire bumpy flight. A thick book, not easy to carry on a plane. Perhaps she got extra luggage, a cert...

We didn’t think it macabre to have a rabbit’s foot in our pocket, to stroke it against our palm or face. We played with cap guns and candy c...

A family of five, we trailered a pop-up tent on highways all around the country, camping in state parks, picnicking in rest areas. It was ho...

A young couple, new to the trail, were both appreciative of our advisories— what lay ahead, the footing, the elevation gain, one inconvenien...

Some day after black-fly season, but before it snows, I will take those interested to Ossipee Glen to see the cellar holes: labor of hands e...

doesn’t take you where it did: to scarlet picnic tables under green neon at Annie’s Snack Shack and tall bottles of beer icy- wet as bare-ha...

Uncle Morris stowed his wooden canoe in the rafters of grandmother’s garage, upside down as if floating on the depth of apex, a doubt on spi...

This is a summer memory: that’s why my feet were bare. Helen’s head was round, her forehead high and pale, her blue eyes meek. Her English p...

He is a traveling salesman child of the Great Depression who, thank God, stopped traveling (much) by the time I was 13. Before him Pap-Pap, ...

My old cat yowls loud and long into the dark. My sympathetic vet explains: She wakes disoriented, uncertain of where she is, where you are....

Widowed and childless, he married again; his second wife, my aunt, also childless, a professional woman before that term was used. Past chil...

Today the fledged finches are on their own, practicing how to feed themselves, how to fly. The females dominate the feeder, filling all six ...

As my grandfather’s handkerchiefs stiffened on the line, she filled a used Royal Crown bottle, sometimes Dr. Pepper (those sugar tits we cra...

Slathered with suntan lotion and sitting under a Shibumi, my husband and I along with two of our dear friends—all of us over sixty-five—ate ...

Evening light in the sycamore trees, the tilting pines, the sandstone boulders across the lawn. Crows call, dogs bark, soccer players on a ...