After living in the former Carmelite monastery — sometimes as seasonal, sometimes as year-round, residents — for almost 19 years, it’s time for Ann and me to move along to a different life. We are simultaneously eager and regretful. It calls to mind Scott Fitzgerald’s famous ...

As you approach it on foot alongside Lake Flower, it seems to be some sort of camp meeting or scout jamboree/bivouac. Tents with pointed tops are lined up around a square of lawn. Their backs are closed to the streets, but they are open to the inside, creating a space for social interaction ...

My three letters lay on the bottom of the collection box — lonely and somewhat pitiable. To the extent that I’d ever envisioned the insides of mail boxes, I’d thought they must be pretty well stuffed. After all, trucks show up about twice a day to empty them. Surely they wouldn’t be ...

My brother was by training and vocation a scientist. So naturally when he set about to grow a patch of wildflowers at his country house in Maine, he went high tech. Well, medium tech anyway. He threw some seeds on the ground, then drove his pickup truck over them to embed them in the soil. I ...

On Independence Day, I usually reflect some on American history and patriotism. But this year — not so much. (Don’t get ahead of me here; it wasn’t for the reason you think.) This most recent Fourth of July was “a beautiful day in the Adirondacks.” I put that in quotation marks as it ...

A few weeks ago, when the weather began to warm up, my wife Ann and I braved the blackflies to perform a joyous annual ritual. Not quite a Chaucerian pilgrimage, but with enough similarities so that Canterbury came to mind — to mine anyway. It was a spring event. And it was — without too ...