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Mel Allen’s Letter from Dublin

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In 2020, the arrival of spring coincided with the rise of an unprecedented American public health crisis. As it is in other nations fighting the coronavirus, life here is profoundly changed, and we don’t know for how long. For the duration, though, Yankee’s longtime editor, Mel Allen, will be posting regular dispatches from our home in southwestern New Hampshire.


July 2, 2020

Mel Allen

Jarrod McCabe

There are so many big things filling our lives, it is easy to feel small in the world, and so finding pleasure in familiar tasks, just taking care of things, brings a comfort I would not have imagined a summer ago. I bought my first new lawn mower since I can remember — in fact, every mower I have had since coming to New England in 1970 has been a castoff from somebody who was happy to take $25 or $50 for a machine they had all but run into the ground. As a young teenager I mowed everyone’s lawns in a new residential development, $5 a yard no matter how large, and I learned early not to ask a mower to do more than it was built for. I have written many stories in my head while walking behind a mower, seeing the fresh-cut grass drift in the air, leaving the scent of summer as it landed. Here, with my new machine, I felt almost giddy firing it up the first time, back in May. When I finished, Annie said the yard looked like a park. The young teenager who lurks inside me smiled with pride.

But then the dry spell came, and lingered. Now the word “drought” regularly crops up on the news. Conversations with a neighbor often begin with “Sure could use rain.” Annie is in the yard early each morning, watering. She has a hose for the front flowers, a hose for the tidy lettuce garden on the side of the house, and a sprinkler for the raised beds beside the river. I can sit outside and just watch the sprinkler, losing myself for a few minutes as the spray undulates back and forth. Every few days she clips tender leaves, and then we drive two miles to the beautiful gardens of Rosaly’s Garden and Farmstand. It is the oldest certified organic garden in the state, and we fill a basket with more greens and early vegetables, and we eat from garden home and away, as if we had gone out.

Rudy lounges with his ball next to a prized addition to the household: a fire engine–red lawn mower, bought new. (At right is the balky $50 beater it replaced.)

Annie Graves

I don’t cut the grass when it is this dry. Already, in places, the lush green has taken on that burnt brown of straw. So I’ve let the tiny oak sprouts gain a toehold. If I were to leave the house for a few years, when I returned there would be a little forest spreading from house to river. It’s a dilemma, not to cut, because this is tick season, and there are deer, and where deer live, ticks thrive. A trim lawn is not just for show — it is what experts say keeps you safe.

When Annie was a child here, a drought settled in, and people talk about it in the same way they speak of historic snowstorms. Wells went dry, livestock perished. Police responded to calls from neighbors reporting that someone was washing their car. There was the sense that everyone had to get through together by following the same precautions. As I type these words, thunder rumbles, close. Two days ago we had a cloudburst in the early evening, and we were in the car and it was hard to see; the rain poured over the road and the car shimmied as it splashed through. Now we could talk about rain for just a bit. Over the Fourth of July weekend, I will mow.

The dryness has one upside for me: It accelerates the seasoning of my woodpile. When I first moved to Maine, my wood came in eight-foot lengths, $25 a cord. I was young and reading Scott and Helen Nearing and We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich, so splitting cords of wood with ax and maul made me feel kinship with these literary heroes of mine. Now my wood arrives cut and split, and our task is to stack and, when cold comes, carry and burn.

Karl has been bringing me wood for over 20 years. You can hear his old red truck rumble down the road before he appears. He lives beside the church in Dublin, and parks his truck in a small lot behind Yankee’s offices. His truck has no sides, just a frame in the rear. If he stacks the wood with precision, the truck bed is full; he says it holds three-quarters of a cord. I order four cords each spring, and he makes many trips — sometimes with a full truck, sometimes not. Trust with a woodsman builds up over many years, and when he finally delivers what he says is four cords, I figure we are pretty close. He spends his days alone in the woods with chain saw and splitter, and when he is not in the woods he is haying. The other day I drove into Dublin and there was Karl sitting atop one of the largest tractors I have ever seen. He was driving it up a country road I have walked hundreds of times, and I had no idea where he was going. In a time when adventures are few to be had, I was tempted to follow at 5 mph just to see where we ended up.

In the backyard, an epic woodpile seasons in the sun, hinting at the winter to come.

Annie Graves

My woodpile stretches across the back of the yard, at least 50 feet. I have dry wood from last winter piled in the woodshed, and on the driveway, a stack just shy of a cord gets the morning sun. I glance at woodpiles in the yards of others when I drive, and I’ll admit feeling envious when I see they have let their wood dry for an extra year, so it is dark as charcoal and will be nearly weightless when they carry it inside. My wood weathers by the week, cracks appearing as it dries, nature’s art as time slowly ages the once-blond maple and oak; by winter it will be brown. I know I am putting more on a woodpile than it was meant to give, but I see it as a voice from the future, six, seven, eight months from now, when it will burn bright in our stove as the night presses down.

In a summer when the yard and the river have become work space, dining room, even vacation getaway, I spend more time watching than I ever have before. A deer with three legs made its way along the river a week ago. I remember seeing in the local paper’s police log that in April someone had phoned to say a three-legged deer was walking along the road. The caller was worried. The report said that the officer saw the deer, but it seemed able to get along fine, so he let it alone. There are many rocks in the river and the water is low, and the deer, with its missing hind leg, stumbled along, but when it reached an embankment, it made its way up and disappeared behind the trees.

A family of Canada geese has been visiting nearly every day, usually in early evening. Silently, all of sudden they’d appear, feeding on the grass along the river. Two adults and four goslings, dining alfresco, as Annie and I were, maybe 25 feet away. I enjoyed their presence even if I had to clean up after them, enjoyed knowing they felt safe in the yard even if Rudy was tethered close by.

An early snapshot of the Canada geese family, browsing down by the river behind the house.

Annie Graves

Three days ago they came back, but now there was only one adult. Although there are many possible reasons why, the most likely is that we have foxes and coyotes, and even bobcats sometimes are spotted along the river. The story in my head is the adult who did not come to dinner this time fought to save the little ones. Early every summer at Cunningham Pond, we’d see a Canada family just like this, the babies swimming after their parents, and as the weeks passed there was usually one fewer until only the adults remained. There are snappers in the pond, and I imagine the parents never even saw the danger, just a frantic splash.

There are so many big things happening all around us, sometimes a small thing can make all the difference. Right now, on the cusp of the Fourth of July, I’d like to see the geese come back and feed on the grass. I’d like to see the deer with three legs come splashing through the water, before it makes its way up the embankment to wherever it goes where shelter awaits.

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June 18, 2020

When your world narrows — as it did for me in late March, when many of us retreated to our homes — then narrows even more with each passing week, you think about people you once saw nearly every day who now might as well live in another country. And in a sense they do. Which is why yesterday I phoned Jud Hale, Yankee’s longtime former editor, under whose watch the magazine became an icon of New England. When I asked how he was, he said he was OK. “I’m not supposed to,” he said, “but I’ve been sneaking out to go to the post office.”

Jud lives in a retirement community only two miles away with his wife, Sally, in a pretty cottage set amid woods and by a river. He is stepping gingerly into his later 80s now, and the past few years have forced him to shed some of the most important fixtures in his life: the island home on Lake Winnipesaukee, where his three sons and later his grandchildren felt a summer day had no end; his home in Dublin, where he wrote in a tower room; his “House for Sale” column, which he wrote as “The Moseyer” for decades; his decades-long succession of golden retrievers, various mutts, and finally Murphy, a long-haired dachshund, whom Jud carried with him on journeys until Murphy, grown deaf and blind, could not hang on any longer.

Before the pandemic sent us all home, Jud still came to the office nearly every day. In winter, the parking lot can get dicey, no matter how urgently it is plowed and salted. For several years we have urged Jud to park in a reserved spot by the front door. The more we asked, the more he dug in and refused, deliberately, it seemed, choosing to park as far away as possible. He once spent three years as a tank commander in Germany, and whatever residue remained from those days roared back at our efforts to tell him that we worried.

The final page from Yankee’s 80th anniversary issue, which was themed “80 Gifts New England Gave to America.” Right up until publication, the staff kept this page a secret from editor in chief Jud Hale, who is celebrated here as the 81st gift.

He’d arrive around 10:30, give or take a half hour, chat for a few minutes with Linda, our receptionist who has been with Yankee for over 50 years, before climbing the stairs to his second-floor office, clutching his wicker basket that held a Boston Globe, a mug of coffee, and pieces of mail. We could hear him walking down the hall as he called out to each person in their office: “Hi, Janice… hi, Tim… hi, Ian… hi, Heather… hi, Joe…” If the New England Patriots had played the day before, he would linger outside the office of Joe Bills, a former sportswriter, and deconstruct the game. Which was notable, since Jud cared so much about the team he could rarely bring himself to watch. He’d then sit at his desk, drink the coffee, read the newspaper, open his mail, and make a few phone calls, his voice booming down the hall.

After an hour or two, he’d walk back down the hall, basket empty, down the stairs and out the door. To an outside observer, he had achieved little. To those of us in the office, he had shown us how what we do stuck to him like a burr, how the meaning of this work remained, and he just wanted to be part of us, even on days of ice when we looked out the windows as he made his way across the pavement.

He attended our Thursday editorial meetings, and we began each one with what we called “Jud’s Three,” during which he would read or talk for three minutes about some quirky or historical New England tradition or tale. He has been with Yankee since 1958, when he joined his Uncle Robb’s magazine as a do-everything assistant editor, and he had a lifetime of anecdotes to pass down. He was — and remains — a storyteller. He wrote three books, and his best, The Education of a Yankee, makes clear where the stories began.

Though born to Boston wealth, his parents moved the family to the wilderness village of Vanceboro, Maine, on the edge of the Canadian border, where they lived on 12,000 acres of both farm- and timberland. His father employed every logger for miles around, and his mother started a Waldorf school based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. “When I dream, I always dream of Vanceboro,” Jud once said to an interviewer.

He always told his writers that storytelling mattered above all else, that we had to make readers feel. Make them laugh, or cry, or be amazed, but they could never be bored, and if they felt emotion they would want more. You wanted to write for Jud the best story you had in you, because he believed you would.

I would not be writing this letter if it were not for Jud. When I met him in 1977, he had taken over the reins of both Yankee and The Old Farmer’s Almanac a decade earlier. John Pierce, the new managing editor of Yankee, brought me to Jud’s office after softening him up a bit by saying that he had read stories I had been writing for Maine newspapers, and that Jud should get to know me.

“Jud’s Museum” at Yankee’s offices in Dublin. Nothing compares with seeing it in person, but you can take a video tour on the Yankee website.

Ian Aldrich

Few people enter Jud’s office without getting a tour of what he calls “Jud’s Museum,” and so before I talked story ideas, I was brought into a small world that is best described as something akin to one of those strange roadside collectible places, except this curator was a tall, blond-haired man, educated at Choate and Dartmouth, who took delight in setting a banana peel on a shelf to see how long it would take before it dissolved.

He showed me a safety pin from the first flight over the North Pole, and a piece of cloth from Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, pebbles from Red Square, a photo of Red Sox legend Ted Williams, and a letter rescued from the Titanic. Over the years, I never learned of anything that was removed from the museum, just more “treasures” he wanted us to know about: seats from Fenway Park that were removed during renovations, and a humble jar labeled “Einstein’s Brain.”

When Jud read that the doctor who had performed Einstein’s autopsy had kept the brain to study, he wrote asking if he could have it in his museum. He added he would respect it and care for it. The doctor wrote back. He had promised Einstein’s family it would not go on display. Jud wrote once more: He would keep it out of sight in a drawer. The doctor never answered. Undaunted, Jud created “what his brain would have looked like,” as he’d tell everyone who looked at the jar in wonder. In time it became hard to know whether the museum reflected Jud’s idiosyncratic tendencies, or whether in his efforts to keep himself entertained by all that surrounded him, he became its most original artifact of all.

Chief among the treasures at Jud’s Museum — which include a taxidermied chicken and a penguin wing, top left, and seats from Fenway Park, bottom left — is Albert Einstein’s brain (or at least a respectable facsimile).

Ian Aldrich

That day when I met Jud I came with a list of 28 story ideas. He said he wanted 25. He and John Pierce assigned me a story each month, $600 apiece. To make my life easier, they gave me a contract so a check would arrive early each month. To a freelancer, this was like finding a hidden door. A year later, my dad, who had retired to Florida, discovered that the back pain he had complained about was lung cancer. The more time I spent seeing my dad, the more I fell behind to keep up with the monthly stories. John and Jud then told me they had retroactively changed my story fee to $800, so I was caught up. There are gestures one does not forget.

A few months before my father died, Jud asked me to join Yankee full-time. I told my father as he lay on his bed, his eyes glazed by opioid painkillers. The lessons of the Depression had burned into him, and he had long fretted that my freelance life was a precarious way to live.

“I’m going to Yankee full-time,” I told him.

“Benefits?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. He smiled, one of the last I can remember, said, “Good,” and then he closed his eyes and slept.

It is easy to look back on my years with Jud and to play the game of where I would be if he had not wanted so many of my stories; if he had lost patience with a young writer who could not fulfill the deal he made. Sometimes I give a talk to some group that wants to know about Yankee. I always begin by saying, “This is a story I heard from Jud Hale.”

He and his wife, Sally, were somewhere around Tamworth, New Hampshire. Sally had an upset stomach. At a general store Jud stopped to get her some Tums. As he entered the store he noticed an old fellow sitting quietly in a chair next to the door. Jud walked up to the counter and asked the proprietor for Tums.

“I’d like the cherry flavor, please,” Jud said.

“We don’t have the cherry-flavored Tums,” the man replied.

“Well, do you have the orange flavor?”

“No, we don’t,” said the man.

“Well, then,” Jud said, a little exasperated, “I’ll just take the plain Tums.”

After paying for it, he was walking out the door when the old fellow in the chair looked up at him as he was passing by and said…

“Looks like you’re gonna have to rough it.”

The audience always laughs, and I bask in Jud’s light for a while. We are all roughing it now, and we don’t know when life will smooth out. But it will, and when it does, I’m going to ask Jud to make it five, not three minutes, and to make us laugh, maybe cry, to remember the power of a good story to pick us up no matter how often we fall.


June 11, 2020

I suspect that many of you reading this have had moments, or even days, when it feels as if you are living in two realities at the same time. We are coping with a pandemic and its ensuing financial free fall, and now the tidal wave of protests sweeping across the country over the death of George Floyd. It is hard to know where to find firm footing. Fear of falling is all around. And yet, we still play with our children, still search for quiet walks, still wonder what we should make for dinner.

Yesterday the afternoon was hot, and I drove Annie to Dublin Lake, where on the far side, away from the slender town beach, there is a boat landing for anglers and paddlers. The lake is icy cold, 100 feet deep in places. She swims in cold water that I will not feel for weeks ahead, but I go with Rudy and we watch. Driving over, the funeral service for George Floyd played live on NPR. There were passionate speeches and sometimes a song, and though I could not see the images, you could feel the tears.

And then we parked by the lake and Annie waded out and soon was in the cold deep blue water. Not 30 feet from where I stood, a loon swam by and then dived deep and I did not see it again. When we came back to the house, I took work to the table outside and a merganser flew along the river, so low it seemed to stir a ripple. It was Tuesday, the day the local Monadnock-Ledger is popped into the mailbox, and on the cover was the photo from the second peaceful demonstration along the nearby highway, now swelled to double the previous week.

As I write this on the 10th day of June, I am told the July/August issue of Yankee has left the printer in Saratoga Springs, New York, and will be in Dublin tomorrow. In normal times, when the new issue arrives, the boxes are stacked against a wall in the mail room and on a black wooden bench in the reception office. Each box holds 50 magazines, and in all my years here I have never actually witnessed someone wheeling them in on the dolly. It’s a bit like magic; I come down the stairs and there they are, the way from one day to the next plants seem to suddenly emerge from soil.

The policy is we are not to open the boxes until copies have been placed in our mail slot. This usually requires the patience of a few days’ wait. But someone, I’m not saying who, usually bends the rule and spirits away a copy or two under the cover of, well, waiting until everyone has left for the day. Even though we have worked on the issue for many weeks, by the time it lands in Dublin I have all but forgotten its contents — we are so deep into the next one — and so sitting down with it at home in the evening, slowly turning the pages, is like discovering anew what we did, and for the first time I can read it for enjoyment, telling the critical voice that lives inside my head to leave me in peace for a while.

But, of course, these are not normal times. The July/August Yankee will be the first in our nearly 85 years to be produced without any of us being in the office. When we all quickly packed up in the last days of March, our new art director, Katty Van Itallie, had settled in for only three days. She barely had time to know us, and then she had to pack up her computer and hope that our technical experts had aced their tests, and that, yes, our text and visual files could zip here and there, back and forth, without any being derailed. At first, we all held our breath.

I know that many of us at times have misgivings about how intrusive technology can be in our lives. I believe that the anxieties that cling to nearly everyone I know are fomented partly by the bombardment of constant images, news, blogs to read, Facebook posts, videos to click on — a nonstop elbow in the ribs saying “you must look at this.” It is why the vacations we most yearn for often promise no Internet, give permission to just turn it all off.  But technology is the only way we could have put out this issue of Yankee, and we did it well. And as tempting as it may be, do any of us have the right or the luxury to turn off now, when the world seems to demand we be more attentive than ever?

Tomorrow I will pop into the Dublin office for two minutes, just long enough for my evil twin to slice open a box and extract a handful of new issues. Katty lives down the street now; Jenn, our managing editor, lives a few blocks farther; and I will leave Yankee on their doorstep, tempting them to settle in, as I will, to a world both with us and seemingly beyond our reach at the same time.

Inside this issue is a story about the tranquil Blue Hill Peninsula in Maine. This is where E.B. White lived and where he wrote Charlotte’s Web. I have been to nearly every village in Maine, and there are few places where sea, forest, and hills twine in a way more lovely than here.

There is also a story about the North Shore of Massachusetts, where Gloucester and Rockport have learned how to make fishing culture a lure for travelers. And for anyone who has been beguiled — or maddened — by the audacity of seagulls, there is a story about why researchers both love them and also wear helmets so they are not concussed by diving birds. That is what we worked on throughout the spring, while the world as we knew it dropped away, and a new reality of face masks and ambulance sirens and the visuals of riot police filled our lives.

Tomorrow I will settle in with these summer pages that speak of waves and gulls and the promise of sitting outside at a lobster shack. With little time, we ripped out a story and replaced it with vignettes of people who had endured hardship and tragedy with uncommon resilience, courage, and a refusal to lose hope.

Even in the pages of this magazine, two realities live side by side. And when I finish, I’ll bring Rudy to the edge of our river. Annie saw fresh deer tracks there this morning. A family of Canada geese climb each night to our lawn and leave their gifts. I will scoop those up in the morning, then come upstairs where I write this and get back to work. The virus remains. The protests continue. It is possible the narrative about racial inequality may be changing forever. People are volunteering to have unproven vaccines put into their bodies so that we can live without fear. Summer is just beginning, but in our Yankee world it is autumn. Photos that were taken when we knew nothing of what was ahead show us trees of beauty, mountains ablaze with color, apple orchards bursting with fruit. There is still wonder. Loons dive deeper than we can imagine, but they always find the surface.


June 4, 2020

It feels different this time. What is happening around us will not recede with the next news cycle or the day’s spin. We sense our country is at a turning point, and which way it will turn we do not yet know. So we are holding our breath. Waiting. A mix of anger, fear, determination, and hope fills the air, like a humidity that clings to us wherever we live.

Right now, early Thursday morning, June 4, the birdsong comes in so loudly through my open windows it is as though I have speakers outside. The sky is blue, the river quiet, and with the day expected to reach the 80s, it feels as if summer has stopped teasing and is ready to settle in. It smells like summer now, lilacs everywhere, and roses starting to wrap around our trestle. The trees along the river have never looked so green. I bought a new lawnmower and the freshly cut grass inspires Rudy to roll on his back, his legs pawing the air in what can only be joy, and I envy his delight.

I live on the main road to Concord, and the traffic, especially trucks, has picked up as businesses begin to reopen all around the state. And if I lived without any news, in a quiet insular world of my own, it might seem that life as we knew it before the pandemic was finding its footing again. But the news floods in, more than most of us can absorb. A friend told me the other day he was struggling to focus on what he had to do. I knew what he meant. I imagine the exception will be anyone who is not torn apart and searching for words and actions that make sense.

I do not know as I write this what today will bring. Or tomorrow. Events beyond this pocket of mountains and forest and lakes and villages where I live feel both distant and close at the same time. When the virus overwhelmed cities only a few hours away, we felt its approach. We followed the numbers. Just two weeks ago our conversations seemed to be about one thing: the pandemic. Would this state and the rest of New England reopen in time for summer? Could tourism survive without summer travelers pouring in? If not, the region’s resiliency would be tested as it has not been in our lifetime. That is what we read and talked about.

Black Lives Matter protest in Peterborough

Hundreds of protesters — including 3-year-old Idris, whose sign reads “Black Lives Matter, I Matter” — gathered last Saturday in Peterborough and Dublin, New Hampshire.

Photos by Ben Conant/Ben Conant/Monadnock Ledger-Transcript

Then Memorial Day came and changed what we talked about, what we thought about. That morning, a black man named Christian Cooper who was strolling, birdwatching, in Central Park asked a white woman to please obey the signs and leash her dog. As she threatened instead to call police and claim she was in danger from “an African-American man,” he calmly recorded the interaction. Soon after, his sister posted the video, and the shock of what people saw and heard sped around the world. Viewers reacted with anger, shame, and the recognition that this is what black men understand can happen to them anywhere, anytime.

Later that evening, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in Minneapolis by a police officer named Derek Chauvin. We not only know that he died, we also witnessed how he died, because a 17-year-old held up her phone and recorded one man taking the life of another. George Floyd’s gasps of “I can’t breathe” now echoes in our history. The cruelty and barbarity of the knee against his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — even as, suffocating, he called for his mother — has shaken this country, an emotional earthquake with aftershocks that repeat day and night. In the news coverage, what we see most often are scenes of destruction and chaos; we have seen those scenes before, and as always the violence of a minority of protestors as well as of police threatens to steal the profound reality of a country stopping in its tracks, saying, This is another virus to kill.

At noon last Saturday a few hundred people, with the blessing of local police, gathered on both shoulders of Route 101 in Peterborough. They stood together, beginning at the main traffic light, a few feet apart, most wearing masks, hoisting signs: Black Lives Matter, Heartbroken, Remember George Floyd. Children stood beside adults, and they lined the roadside flowing west for a few hundred yards. Seven miles away in Dublin, the scene repeated, all ages standing along both shoulders of the road, faces masked, signs held aloft. It was not a protest march to make national news. But in that shared hour, neighbors said to neighbors, We can’t be quiet. No matter where we live, we have to play a part.

I have a friend who lives an ocean away, and when I told him about the outpouring of shared feelings in these small towns, he asked how that could make a difference, especially since so few people of color live here. I understood the question. New England is one of the whitest regions in the country. Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire are three of the four whitest states in America. Except for a few urban pockets — Portland and Lewiston in Maine, Burlington in Vermont, and Manchester in New Hampshire — many residents here in northern New England will live their whole lives without working beside someone who is not white, someone who has lived the bitter truth and consequence of racism. Within this bubble, it can be easy to draw a curtain against a reality far from one’s own.

I am the editor of a magazine whose very name lends itself to a stereotype: The word “Yankee” conjures up the face of the Maine fisherman, the Vermont farmer, the wilderness logger, the maple syrup maker, the flinty citizen at town meeting, all of whom are likely white. This has been one of the challenges I have not yet succeeded in meeting.

People have always read Yankee in part because they find comfort in it. The world is so complex, so often unsettling, and we give them beautiful images of lakes and coasts, fall foliage and snow-capped mountains, lobster shacks by the rocky shore, winding country roads. People have told me they feel their blood pressure being lowered as they read; they look elsewhere for commentary on social and political crises. Even when we write about complex issues facing the region — whether rising seas, or intrusive pipelines, or opioids, or asylum seekers putting down roots in an old mill town — Yankee remains in the minds of many the magazine of a New England that is always lovely, always inviting.

A native of Keene, New Hampshire, Jonathan Daniels was an Episcopal seminarian who was killed in Alabama in 1965 while protecting a fellow civil rights worker, 17-year-old Ruby Sales.

Courtesy of the Virginia Military Institute Archives

But there is both an old story and a new one being told right now. Old to black people, new to anyone to whom “Black Lives Matter” felt abstract, belonging somewhere not here. There were other victims of police violence in just the few weeks before George Floyd died, and their names, too, are spoken at protest rallies, but the unbearable intimacy of watching what happened to this man made it about here, wherever here may be. The curtains can’t be closed again, no matter what business we are in.

So I think about the question from my friend overseas. Do a few hundred people on a New Hampshire roadside move even a pebble’s worth of the mountains of pain and hurt felt by people of color? Probably not. But there are hundreds of these gatherings now, and within them moments that provide both inspiration and hope. Scores of people, so many of them young, lying face down on roadways and in parks, their arms clasped behind their backs, in total silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. White people standing, kneeling, marching, yelling, crying alongside black. In Connecticut, a state trooper holding hands with a black protestor. Police everywhere being photographed kneeling beside protestors, police chiefs across the country saying, This is how change will happen. There will be no turning back.

My son Dan once attended an elementary school in Keene, New Hampshire, named for Jonathan Daniels, who had grown up in that small city. Daniels was a seminarian at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he joined many others to fight for civil rights in the deep South. He was 26 years old, when, in a small Alabama town, he tried to enter a store with two black teenagers to buy them a soda. A local deputy sheriff aimed his shotgun at one of them, Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her to safety as the gun went off, killing him instantly. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.” Ruby Sales, who is now in her 70s, went on to found the Spirit House Project in honor of the man who saved her life. The project has documented more than 2,000 state-sanctioned deaths against black men and women, nearly all of whom were unarmed. She has dedicated her life to his death, and her work now ripples through the Black Lives Matter movement. How many pebbles did Jonathan Daniels move before he was killed? How many does Ruby Sales continue as she keeps on with her own mission?

It feels different this time. If this is not a crossroads for America, then I do not know what that might look like. The irony is not lost that George Floyd lost his life on Memorial Day, a day when services honoring the men and women killed in wars end always in prayer and always, always with the words: We will never forget.


May 27, 2020

Time is starting to diffuse; I awake with daylight and sleep when it is dark, but the hours in between become harder to discern. Recently I asked Annie what day it was, and she replied, “Noneday.” That seemed about right. I cannot recall another period in my life when nearly everything seems to be so ripe with metaphor. The most ordinary events, things I once took for granted, whether food shopping or waving hello to a passing motorist, seem to carry deeper messages now, or maybe they always did and I am just now paying more attention. Despite myself, as someone who is always hurrying to the next project, I am trying to look a day in the eye and hold its gaze for just a few moments. I am learning patience.

A year or two after we moved in here, we planted a crab apple tree on the front lawn. It was a newborn, tiny and spindly, reaching barely to my knees. Each year it sprouted higher, and now it stretches far above me, well over 15 feet. With the sun and warmth of May the buds opened, and just last week glorious white blossoms filled the tree. These blossoms tease you with their beauty, because soon after that burst of brilliance, petals rained down and laid a carpet of white on the newly mowed grass. When I walk Rudy to the backyard, we have to pass beneath the branches, and the fluttering petals in a breeze must seem to him like flying insects, and he snaps his head trying to corral them. In a few more days the tree will be leafy green, and weeks later tiny apples will emerge, no bigger than almonds. In fall the tree will shelter flocks of trilling cedar waxwings, who feast on the sour fruit. And when the cold comes the tree will be bare, waiting, like all of us, for light and warmth. Nothing I can do will alter that rhythm of beginnings and endings.

A tender sapling just 10 years ago, this crab apple tree now stands about 15 feet tall and carpets the front yard with its blossoms.

Annie Graves

It takes us five minutes to walk from our house to the center of town. To reach town we cross a 75-foot-long bridge that spans the Contoocook River. Well, we used to cross the bridge. No longer. The bridge was built in 1940 to replace another that was destroyed in the Hurricane of ’38. We have been hearing about the big bridge replacement project for some years, and now the due date has arrived. The quiet beauty of a small New England town has given way to a hub of noise and fierce machines that chew up concrete and dig deep into earth, a scene to hold any 6-year-old kid transfixed for hours. We are told this will be a two-year project, and because it is all new to the eye, we always pause and watch.

Our favorite perch is by the library wall, where you see the river rushing below and the huge bulldozers, bucket loaders, and cranes towering over the scene. On the riverbank rests a lone dinghy that I assume is there on the off chance that a worker will lose his footing and tumble into the cold water and need to be hauled back in. But it seems more likely that after the workers leave for the day, a curious (and foolish) bystander will find it irresistible to explore what the day’s work has uncovered under decades of dirt, and a dunking will be the consequence. Last week when we walked at twilight we saw two women taking selfies while sitting in the bucket loader.

As the weather heats up, so does construction on the Main Street bridge in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Because of weight restrictions the town’s fire trucks have long had to avoid the deteriorating span, built 80 years ago; the new bridge is set to be completed in 2022.

Annie Graves

We say hello to the workers when we walk by and they nod in return. Their ages seem to span from 20s to 60s. They notice that Rudy walks with a tennis ball wedged in his mouth — a Jack Russell pacifier, I call it — and the other day when he did not have it, one worker yelled out, “Hey, he forgot something.” They will be with us for many months, through heat and cool and then cold, and when they are finished we will have a wider sidewalk, a wider street, and a spanking-new bridge with some of the original stone facing so that we feel we have the same familiar structure, only better.

We watched one recent morning when the temporary pedestrian bridge was being lowered into place, since the sidewalks are now impassable. It has been a lifetime since I was that six-year-old kid, but we both watched the deftness of the crane operator as he had to capture the structure, lift it into the air, and place it ever so gently in place. It took a long time — nearly an hour, it seemed — and it was like watching mechanical surgery, a piece of hard-hat theater many of us never see playing out in our town center.

When we walk past the workers on our way to the park, they politely slide a few steps over, mindful of our concern for distancing even as they stand shoulder to shoulder all day. Two days ago, for the first time, we saw two workers with face masks; I do not know if they were new to the site or new to masks. I have a good friend who for years has worked construction as a blaster. He is now in his mid-60s and feels his age and reads the statistics about who is most vulnerable to this virus, so he wears a mask wherever he works. He says he is the only one. I am as perplexed as anyone over how this simple ask that has been shown to be one weapon we all can employ in this fight has become yet another way we divide.

Some years ago I met the wonderful writer Sarah Wildman at a writers conference in Quebec City. Her daughter, Orli, then was perhaps 4, a beautiful wide-eyed child. She is now 11 and being treated for a rare form of liver cancer. Sarah and her husband brought Orli to Boston for a liver transplant, and then COVID-19 hit us all and here they remain. She wrote an essay about Orli, and this stood out to me. I wish it could be read by every single person who demands the right to not wear a face mask when out in public. It is both a plea and an anthem for looking out for each other, especially those among us who need the most looking after.

We are the people you’re being asked to stay home for. Yes, you’re staying home for yourselves, of course, for your children, your parents. But also for my daughter, whom you’ve never met, who was given a fragile second chance we are so desperate to shelter. And for her doctors and nurses — and for your doctors, and your nurses. The work the world is now doing, my family learned just a few months ago, is akin to building a small lean-to around a newly planted tree, the boards built of good intention and follow-through. They are terrifyingly wobbly.

With graduation ceremonies canceled at Conval, the regional high school based in Peterborough, front lawns became showcases for local pride in high school seniors.

Annie Graves

There remain some certainties that still unite us, no matter where we live, no matter what we do, or what our politics may be. If you could have driven around the Monadnock Region over Memorial Day weekend, you would have seen what I mean. Contoocook Valley Regional High School (Conval) embraces nine small towns, and about 720 students from grades 9 through 12. Faced with the demoralizing prospect of seniors having neither graduation nor the sense of bonding that comes with it, parents and seniors created a “Seniors Graduation Celebration Drive Tour.” No matter where you walked or drove over the weekend, you would have seen blue and gold balloons, hand-painted posters, streamers, signs with photographs of students, and on Pine Street here in town, what looked like a theater set of an astronaut “reaching for the stars.”

Across the region a singular voice arose from storefronts and town commons and parks and homes: “We know this is hard, we wish it could be different, but we are behind you and congratulations.” These displays won’t help the students get jobs, or replace the once-in-a lifetime-sendoff from high school to whatever comes next — but it will remind them that they are not branches without a trunk. Others are looking out for them. Tiny skinny trees become beautiful and give shelter and food to birds; a bridge that a hurricane tore away, and then was rebuilt only to have time take its toll, is being built anew. It will take many months, and now it is messy and noisy and it is impossible to see all those months down the road when a new one will again stand sturdy across the river. That is what bridges have always done: They take us across those places we cannot go alone.


May 20, 2020

The white wooden crosses bearing names in black letters, each aligned perfectly alongside a small American flag, suddenly appeared Saturday in the wedge of lawn between the town hall and the historical society here in Peterborough. Veterans remember their service and their comrades in many ways; these crosses and flags are how Richard Dunning, who was wounded in Vietnam, chooses to remember. When he was principal at the middle school, he and the shop students built the crosses and painted them white. With his wife and grandkids, he plants them each year, early in the morning, shortly before Memorial Day.

A lot of wars have called the young men and women of Peterborough: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This year, 99 white crosses rise from the ground, one for each person who did not come home. They stand in the town center, as quietly powerful as any speech could be.

Last evening we lingered there, looking at the names on the crosses. I wrote some down, including three that seemed to echo another time: Philemon W. Cross. Gustavus A. Forbush. Henry C. Taggart. Later I learned that they were among 40 local men killed in the Civil War. Gustavus Forbush, for instance, was a carpenter, and he was shot just as he reached the top of Fort Harrison in the battle for Richmond, Virginia.

As Memorial Day approaches in Peterborough, New Hampshire, flags and handmade crosses fill the lawn at the town landmark known as the Memorial Gates. This year there are 99 crosses, one for every local resident who never came back from war.

Annie Graves

I remember being at Arlington National Cemetery more than a decade ago, working on a story about a Maine wreath grower who brought thousands of wreaths to Arlington each December. People would travel from all over to place the wreaths against the headstones. I met a Virginia woman named Nancy Cox, who came here every year to do just that. “I say the names aloud,” she told me. “I say to myself, When is the last time someone said this soldier’s name out loud?

I never forgot that, and last night I, too, said the names as I went down the rows: Philemon Cross … Gustavus Forbush … Henry Taggart …

On the brick walls that border the tiny green are plaques commemorating every local man and woman who has gone to war. As in so many small towns, Peterborough’s families have roots that stretch deep into the past, and there are names here that I’ve seen on street signs and storefronts. Annie grew up here, and now and then as she read a name, she told me she’d gone to school with that person’s son or daughter.

There is something about names engraved on a wall that holds the eye, and digs at the heart. Three years ago, on Memorial Day, we were at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. I remember the flowers, so many, pressed against the black granite. And the letters that loved ones had propped against the wall, many with photographs of young men who would today be pushing 70 and beyond. The image that everyone who visits the Wall seems to come away with is that of Vietnam veterans scanning the rows before stopping on a name … and then standing there. I overheard a woman who was looking at an older man running his fingers across the names. “They were all the same age then,” she said softly. “They are the same age now.”

Scenes from a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where tributes range from flowers and flags to personal relics. Known as simply the Wall, the memorial holds 58,276 names, including that of Marine 1st Lt. Alfred Bayard Russ of Hancock, New Hampshire, who attended high school in Peterborough and was killed near Da Nang in 1968.

Annie Graves

This year, for the first time anyone can recall, there will be no Memorial Day parade here in town. A ceremony that brings generations together in a way unlike any other, it is when veterans march proudly, a few still able to wear the uniform they came home with. The school band plays with spirit, the notes of “The Marines’ Hymn” and “Anchors Aweigh” carrying through the streets, the drummer banging away for all he’s worth. Members of the American Legion carry their flag, and kids run to keep pace in their Cub Scout or Boy Scout or Little League uniforms. The long, mournful notes of “Taps” drift into the air, making even children feel the solemnity of the moment though they do not really know why.

But on Monday, even without the parade, we will still gather by the post office bridge, where a pretty park edges the river. Flowers will be tossed into the water, gunfire will crack through the air, and as always there will be a speech, a prayer, and the silent hope that no new crosses will ever need to join those on the lawn.


May 13, 2020

This past week I learned that finding an unexpected treasure could make me smile, even laugh, one minute and then, without warning, make me shudder — and see with fresh eyes what is happening around us today. Here is what happened:

One evening we went on our usual walk into town, a route that takes us behind the library. Dating from 1833, the Peterborough library boasts it is the first tax-supported library in the country. (Being first in something historical is important in New England. Just a few miles west, in Dublin, where Yankee has been since 1935, the library has its own boast: the first free public library in America.) Despite its proud history, a good portion of the Peterborough library is now being taken down, to make way for an $8.5 million addition. A moving van has been parked outside recently, and while the library is currently closed to visitors, I can imagine the flurry of activity inside, with crates of books being packed for delivery to a temporary space across town.

We paused here for a reason. That morning, during Yankee’s online staff meeting, art director Katty Van Itallie had mentioned that her husband had found some of the earliest issues of Yankee apparently tossed out behind the library. She held up to her computer the magazine’s second issue ever — October 1935 — and said there were many others waiting in a heap.

And so they were: a pile of Yankee magazines on the ground, tucked up against the back wall. In fact, there was a whole collection of stuff lying here and there. It looked as if someone was clearing out the clutter from nearly 200 years and had started with the easy stuff: old furniture, metal racks, paperbacks, magazines that had not been read for decades.

Rescued from a materials cull at the Peterborough Town Library: a cache of Yankee issues (“New England’s Own Magazine, Enjoyed by Readers Everywhere”) from the prewar era, when the cover price was 25 cents.

Annie Graves

Rain was forecast, and though they were under a roof, I felt oddly protective of these issues that Yankee editors long before me had put together. I picked them up — there were 40 remaining — and carried them home, no longer unwanted.

At Yankee’s Dublin office, there is a small room where you can find bound collections of every issue of the magazine, beginning with founder Robb Sagendorph’s first one, in September 1935. I cannot recall when I last browsed through these heavy, musty volumes. But when I spread my orphaned Yankees out on our living room floor and sorted them in order — from November 1935 to December 1941, when war arrived — I felt as if I had brought home a gift of times past, which is so welcome now that all thoughts, all conversations, are revolving around the present.

As evening came on, I sat down with these oversize issues in my lap (Yankee did not adopt its long-running “pocketbook” size until after the war, when paper shortages and costs made it the obvious choice for thrifty New Englanders), and one by one, I looked back. Paper pockets were glued to the backs of many of the issues, holding yellow library cards filled with the penciled names of those who had borrowed them. As I leafed through the pages, I imagined the people behind the names, who had lived here in the depths of the Great Depression and just before the war that likely changed them forever.

The back cover of this issue from November 1941 has a tart editor’s note in the corner: Postmaster: The defense program prevents the use of mailing envelopes. Your cooperation in delivering this magazine undamaged is appreciated.

Annie Graves

The November 1935 issue had a portrait of Mark Twain on its cover, in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth. There would have been about 600 readers of this issue, and it did not warrant many more: It would be another few years before Yankee’s idiosyncratic humor showed up, along with popular features like the Swoppers’ Columns.

Many of the Swoppers’ listings held the kernel of a short story whose ending we would never know. From January 1938: Would discuss Thoreau and swap nature notes with beautiful blonde, not over 5 feet 4, send picture. February 1938: Wanted by gal, a portable typewriter. In swop one untanned deer hide (shot this fall) and a prize springer spaniel who barks incessantly but is swell with kids. And another: Yankee bachelor maid with an itchy pen and a love of life will swop letters that really are letters with a man-about-town or -about-country.

I turned a page, and saw the future lit up in this 1938 dispatch: George Proctor, New Hampshire’s Game Warden, told the story about New Hampshire State Trooper Fletcher Forsythe who had a special harness made for his Irish Setter that he covered with reflector ornaments. He suggested bike riders and walkers at night should come up with something too.

Left: This edition of the Swoppers’ Columns included an ad from “a wistful bachelor” looking to swap six pairs of holey wool socks for two pairs of “wholey” ones. Right: An ad for the “Snow Train,” a first-in-the-nation tourism initiative launched by B&M Railroad in 1931, promising a welcome diversion in the face of hard economic times.

Annie Graves

By 1938, even in the pages of a magazine devoted mostly to rural life, the threat of Hitler was becoming impossible to ignore. One of the best-known writers in the country at the time was Gladys Hasty Carroll, a Maine novelist whose debut, As the Earth Turns, had recently been a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In 1938 she wrote a series for Yankee on her travels to Europe. Her writing on Germany is both lovely and full of foreboding:

Uniforms are everywhere, five, six, and eight on each street corner, long gray coats flapping over their swords, faces grave and fair, Hitler’s portrait in colors graces the windows of the finer shops.” In a toy shop she sees “Half the dolls are boys in uniform; girl dolls are nurses. How does a child cuddle and tend a Red Cross nurse?… Where are the people who made the music and spun the stuff of fairy tales? In Cologne, seeing the Cathedral with the moon behind it, I could have cried. It was so beautiful and so alone…. Down in the street under my window, it rains hard; and men in gray are marching past. Why? I cannot say. Where? I have no idea. I’m only an American, staying overnight in a German hotel, and realizing I have never heard soldiers on the march before.

And then I left the rumors of war and lost myself in the comfort of Yankee’s ads, which told stories of their own. Here was a 12-room house with 90 country acres: $10,000. A century-old Vermont homestead with eight rooms, porch, fireplace, large barn, chicken house, 1,500-foot elevation, 50-mile view, brook, 25 acres: $3,800. I looked at photos of maple syrup jugs: a gallon for $2. A room at New York’s Langdon Hotel, on Fifth Avenue at 56th Street, a smart address and not expensive: $6 double. There are ads for canned codfish cakes, known for their delicate flavor, and for the burgeoning sport of skiing where the snow never fails.

At the end of the night, I had come to the last months of 1941 and the brink of war. I had thought I would just glance through these Yankee relics but instead found myself reading entire stories, thinking, My mother was 20 then, she did not know that in three years she would marry my father on an army base, and there my sister would be born. This was her era. My dad’s era. The only way I would know it was here, turning these pages.

A bucolic winter scene and a call for national unity mark the cover of December 1941, a holiday issue on the eve of war.

Annie Graves

On the December 1941 cover were these words: A Yankee is an American, and in the present crisis, thank God, the North, South, East, and West are together, working and fighting for the same principles and ideals. And yet, on the pages inside, I noticed something in the small print for many inn and hotel ads. An inn on Nantucket: Restricted. A hotel in Hyannis: Restricted clientele. Four lodges and inns in New Hampshire: Selected clientele … Restricted … Selected clientele … Christian clientele only.

Looking up these phrases on the Web took me down a path I had not expected: “Restricted clientele” meant no Jewish clientele. I paused. Not long after this issue was published, my father became one of roughly half a million Jewish soldiers serving in the U.S. armed forces. I asked Google another question, and found out that some 4,000 Jewish soldiers had landed at Normandy. Not one of them would have been able to vacation at these places advertised in Yankee, if and when they returned. I wish I could go back in time and be in the room when these ads, so removed from the cover’s “same principles and ideals,” were being accepted. But I cannot.

Here is the thing: Yankee did eventually stop taking those ads. Many of those same inns and hotels are still here, and I doubt today’s owners and staff could even envision an era when guests were turned away. Today we say we have never been so divided — we can’t even all agree to wear a mask to care for each other’s health — but at the same time I learn every day about acts of kindness and courage and concern that take my breath away.

The world of December 1941 is long ago, and yet still with us. Again we are in the fight of our lives. I know what Robb Sagendorph put on the cover back then seems beyond our reach: in the present crisis, thank God, the North, South, East and West are together, working and fighting for the same principles and ideals. And I wonder what someone will think of the 2020 issues of Yankee if they find them 80 years from now, tossed out when a local library clears out its clutter. I hope they will see that these are the stories from a time unlike any we had known, stories about how we kept believing in the best of us. Because the virus of restricted clientele died out. And we never stopped looking and finding the beauty all around us, and we never forgot what got us through, not once, not ever.


May 6, 2020

Summer arrived here on Sunday. The sky was blue, the sun hot. The thermometer read 80. My wife, Annie, and I live beside the Contoocook River in Peterborough, and for the first time this year we set up the table on the lawn and the outdoor furniture, cranked open the umbrella, and let the day drift along like the river. Our house was built in the 1820s, with two huge fireplaces in the basement where food was once prepared. Historical records suggest it housed factory workers for a good part of a century, and I picture them on a Sunday, watching the water flow, just like this.

In our 12 years here, we have seen a bald eagle in our oak tree, great blue herons skimming low, kingfishers on the hunt in the evening, a family of Canadian geese that every fall use the grass as their feeding station, a beaver that gnawed its way through our young trees, bobcat tracks, a bear track, a moose track. Sometimes when I walk outside late at night with Rudy, our Jack Russell terrier, he will begin to bark wildly into the dark and pull on the leash with ferocious urgency. I know at those times there is something close by that is best to avoid.

Right now I have a complicated feeling, even a trace of guilt, about living here in this pretty town, beside this pretty river, heating my small house with the wood I keep stacked on the edge of the yard. I know that millions of people cannot step outside and see the sun sparkling on the water as we do, going about our day, Annie planting lettuce and I picking up hundreds of acorns before they all sprout into a miniature forest. In the news I see images of beaches packed with people of all ages who are willing to risk their health and that of their fellow citizens just to be outside and soak up the ocean air. I want to think I would not be one of those people — that this collective cabin fever would not lead me to ignore the health experts and scientists when they plead for us to stay in. But here I am, with my tidy yard, a river to watch, the promise of a heron streaking by. So, I don’t have to find out.

Left: A cascade of spring blossoms on River Street, a quiet stretch of road in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Right: A backyard view of the Contoocook River.

Annie Graves

I have the same complicated feeling now when we walk into town, and always to River Street, the prettiest lane in Peterborough. This week, the magnolias and cherry trees were in full blossom. I know that fall foliage is New England’s signature season — our very own Mardi Gras — but when spring truly comes alive here, I can’t think of a more beautiful, more welcome time. So, I understand why license plates from distant places are suddenly everywhere in town.

I have not paid attention to license plates this closely since I was a boy sitting in the backseat with my sister as our father drove us on some road trip. We’d call out license plates we spied from states that seemed as mysterious as a foreign land: “Nebraska!” “Arkansas!” “Utah!” Now, though, it is very different. Yesterday as I was turning in to our driveway, three cars in a row with Massachusetts plates passed by. At the local supermarket on Saturday, I saw Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut. Then there was the young woman we saw unloading suitcases from a car with Texas plates and taking them into an apartment we’d seen being cleaned a few days earlier. And overlooking the river is a pretty Airbnb where I’ve seen New York, Illinois, California, and Connecticut plates over the past several weeks.

If I lived in one of the states hit hardest by the coronavirus, I’d want to be here, too, in a town where you can walk or bike and never feel crowded. There is a part of me that wants to say to visitors, Welcome, be well, be safe. And there is also a part of me, deep down, that shares the fears of many others in rural areas, and wants to say: We don’t know you. We don’t want to be unwelcoming, but can you go back home?

Guide to Vinalhaven, Maine | Eat, Stay & Play

Browns Head Lighthouse on Vinalhaven.

Mark Fleming

Today, a woman phoned me from the island of Vinalhaven. She had seen one of our e-newsletters touting beautiful Maine islands for readers to daydream about — including hers. She was worried that people would do more than daydream; they would come to see the island for themselves. “We are the oldest population in the country,” she said. “You can’t believe how on edge we are.” I do believe it. In some ways, we are all islanders.

Where I live, we have always welcomed people from away. When we see them sitting outside the Waterhouse restaurant where the river hurries along, or strolling in and out of shops in Depot Square, or on the trail climbing Mount Monadnock, we see our gifts reflected back to us. I want that feeling back. I don’t want to look a license plate from New York with a twinge of concern. I want to stop and say, “You won’t see it in a guidebook, but walk along River Street, and see if it doesn’t make you want to stay.”


April 29, 2020

I don’t know the names of the two young women I saw walking from the pond beach to the nearly empty parking lot at dusk last Saturday. I wish I had asked if they would mind if my wife, Annie, took their photo. But I hesitated, thinking it was too intimate a moment for us to interrupt, and by the time I realized that maybe they would want to share it with others, they had climbed into their car and driven away.

It had been a mild day, 50s, the last weekend in April, and after a day of chores — stacking firewood, raking fallen branches and brambles and leaves from the yard — we had gone to our favorite local spot, Cunningham Pond. There are few summer days when we don’t go there after I come home from work, and we stay until the sun sets behind the trees. The pond is only 34 acres, 18 feet at its deepest point, and so pristine that for years it supplied our town’s drinking water. When Yankee wrote about it, we called it “Elizabeth’s Gift,” because local writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas had bought the pond with proceeds from her best-selling book, The Hidden Life of Dogs, and bestowed it upon the citizens of Peterborough (with the provision that a second, smaller beach be set aside for dogs).

This Saturday I knew the pond would be Maine-ocean cold, the cold that seems at first to burn. We had come not to swim but only to see it, for the first time in months: the rippled water, the lifeguards’ pretty cottage, the path where blueberry bushes crowd close in July. Mostly, we went to remember the ease of summer.

A typically pristine view of Cunningham Pond in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Photo by Annie Graves

As we walked down to the beach, we saw the two young women headed up. I thought at first they had wrapped themselves in towels, and I shouted over, “Did you go in the water? Was it freezing?” One shouted back, “No, it’s our prom night!” And when I looked again, I saw they were wearing beautiful long gowns, and that everything about them was elegant.

Of course prom had been cancelled, here and everywhere, which means so many thousands of high school students had bought or made dresses only to have nowhere to wear them. So, two friends came to this lovely pond and made a memory they will surely talk about long into the future. Maybe if they read this — or someone who knows them reads this — they will send us the photos I am certain they took of themselves, looking happy and proud, with the sun glinting on the water.

This is the kind of story that our local paper, the biweekly Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, writes about. Like so many small-town newspapers, it has been around for generations. Entire lifetimes play out in its pages: a birth notice … youthful achievements on athletic fields, or in band, or in theater or 4-H clubs … honor roll mentions … graduations … news from college or the military or trade school … a wedding notice … more birth announcements … and one day, the final notice, when a person has passed. Countless households here have scrapbooks filled with clippings from the Ledger, some no doubt going back decades, telling the story of a family in one yellowed swatch after another.

Left: The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, which carried the story of former Yankee colleague Kirsten Colantino and her battle with COVID-19. Right: Kirsten with daughter Florence.

Portrait courtesy of Kirsten Colantino

The newspaper also reports on the things that matter only here: a road paving project, a zoning petition, what band is playing Friday at Harlow’s, who is signing books at the Toadstool. It’s the steady voice that connects all of us who live in the Monadnock region, and it is needed now more than ever.

On Tuesday, the front page told us about a solitary trout fisherman who is living his social-distancing dream on the Souhegan River. It also reported that our famed summer theater, the Peterborough Players, has cancelled the season. And then, in a narrow column running down the side of the front page, I saw a name I knew: Kirsten Colantino. A friend and former colleague at Yankee, Kirsten is 53 and lives in Dublin. She is a hiker and a runner who had not been sick for a decade. But after returning home after a trip to Florida with her daughter in March, she soon felt ill. It was COVID-19. “Like being hit by a freight train,” she told the reporter. As to why she was sharing her recovery battle, Kirsten said, “I thought it was important to get a personal voice out there.”

Local newspapers rarely have circulations of more than 10,000, and most have half that at best. Yet they are with us, week after week, no matter what: a crippling ice storm, a two-foot snowfall, a pandemic. We rightfully extoll the frontline doctors and nurses and EMTs and everyone who works under the most hazardous and stressful circumstances to help others. They are the ones for whom whole cities cheer, every night, and they deserve all the thanks we can give. But I want to also praise the reporters working long into the night to bring the stories of their towns to the rest of us.

With restaurants and shops closed, there are precious few advertisers putting money into newspaper pages. For the first time, the Ledger has reached out to the public for donations; there are many other newspapers facing the same odds. We need them. Those two young women in their lovely prom dresses one day may have another chance to celebrate a special event, and I want a local newspaper to be here to tell about it — a story for family and friends and fellow townspeople, so far from the affairs of the world, and never more important than now.


April 22, 2020

It’s a strange feeling to realize that a story my father told about living through the 1918 flu epidemic is now becoming my story, and the story of my two sons, and the story of all of us, a century later. Then 11 years old, he was living with his parents, two brothers, and a sister in a cramped second-floor apartment above the used-clothing store his Russian-immigrant father owned in Philadelphia. The flu hit the city hardest in the fall, and soon all schools were shut. Before the epidemic abated, more than 12,000 had died. It was one of the heaviest tolls in the country.

I doubt I paid much attention to what my father said when he told me that story. We were likely looking at the only photo I remember seeing of him as a boy: He is sitting on a pony in the middle of a street, for some reason. And I haven’t thought about my father’s experience in that epidemic for decades. But now I am. I don’t know what his family did to survive — there is no one left to ask. Maybe just knowing that they did survive is enough, and that the little used-clothing store and that crowded apartment were both still there when I was growing up.

Thinking of my dad at age 11 makes me think of children today. I wonder what they will remember, what stories they will tell. Many have computers and video games; they have cellphones. They are confined but not cut off. Still, this is a time they will never forget. My generation came of age when nuclear war was not abstract. A bell would ring at our elementary school, and we’d scoot beneath our desks and huddle like turtles, hands over our ears so that (we were led to believe) the sound of the blast would be muffled. But no blast came. And as years passed, we no longer crouched waiting for the unthinkable. Today’s children will no doubt prove to be the most resilient of all. I can only imagine the collective sound they will make when once again they can romp on playgrounds and ball fields, and run out to recess. We adults may need to hold our hands over our ears as their joy cascades across our towns.

The kids who grew up to make Yankee include (clockwise from top left) senior food editor Amy Traverso; photo editor Heather Marcus; associate digital editor Katherine Keenan; deputy editor Ian Aldrich; senior digital editor Aimee Tucker (yes, that’s a teeny-tiny toy computer in her hand!); and editor Mel Allen (with sister Anita and their dog, Queenie).

What started me down this path of thinking about children was a message that Amy Traverso, our senior food editor, sent out to the Yankee staff a few weeks ago. With all nine of us now working at home, we’re using a platform called Microsoft Teams to stay connected, send files, collaborate on projects, and also, from time to time, get playful. Amy announced she was launching a series of challenges under the heading of “Yankee Fun Times,” something to give us a laugh and keep alive the bond we shared daily in the office. Think of it as small talk in a world with so much talk about big things.

For this week’s challenge, we all had to dig up a favorite photo from our childhood. When I first saw this request, I sighed; I just couldn’t find the time to wedge in one more project, no matter how frivolous. But then there was Amy, giddily playing in ocean waves; Heather, our photo editor, on a Shetland pony named Pepper; our deputy editor, Ian, on a swing, his face full of mischief. There were also no fewer than four photos of future editors in tutus. I scrolled through the photos and realized I had been wrong. Looking at who we once were and knowing who we became, I saw the thread through time. A story on its inevitable loop.

Every Thursday morning, we have an editorial meeting by way of video conference — which to me is mysterious technological alchemy. Our senior digital editor, Aimee Tucker, has a 2-year-old daughter named Vivien, who often joins our meetings sitting on her mother’s lap, looking wide-eyed and intently at what must seem a strange set of talking heads onscreen — as if we are simply living in some secret chamber in her house, only to pop out once a week.  She doesn’t disrupt what we do. She patiently shares her mother’s attention with us. I do not know what Vivien will remember from these weeks and possibly months. Maybe none of it. Or she may have a glimmer that her mother was always there, even as voices and faces popped up unexpectedly before vanishing in a flash.

Like parents across New England and beyond, Yankee senior digital editor Aimee Tucker is working remotely with a little one at home — which means daughter Vivien occasionally shares screen time on video calls.

One day I want to tell her, “Vivien, your mother woke so early, even before you, and she stayed awake late, long after you, so she could do what she knows connects thousands of people to New England.” I will want her to see the photo of her mother when she was a little girl, when she dressed up and danced, because that is what children should always do, even when their parents worry about an uncertain future. “Vivien,” I will say when she is older, “there was danger, yet you were protected. You made your mother laugh. You made a whole group of editors smile. That is how life continues.”


April 15, 2020

I have taught writing for 20 years — first at UMass, now in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts, as well as at a number of workshops. I have no magical words that I pass on to help students reach their potential. So much depends on how deeply they want to work on the craft, how widely they read, how keenly they observe the world around them, and how well they understand the music of words. But I do always tell them this: To make their stories live on the page, they need scenes. Life happening, people talking, people reacting, movement, conflict, choices, resolutions. Every story I give my students to read is rich with scenes.

Last evening my wife, Annie, and I walked into town. It was nearly 7. It was cool, the light soft. And nobody was around. We walked up the hill, past the waterfall, through neighborhoods where now and then we stirred a dog to bark from inside a house. Forty minutes passed, and we saw only two other people.

It hit me then — in our small town, with spring poking its way through, with grass greening — that it was if this place had been stripped of scenes. I know from the news that there is immense courage and sadness everywhere, that makeshift hospitals now rise in New York’s Central Park, that healthcare workers are reaching their breaking points, that governors and mayors lie awake over how to balance saving lives against preserving livelihoods. But here, in this moment, that all seemed elsewhere. I listened to the barking, the wind slapping the trees. The scenes were inside these trim homes, and the doors were shut for the night.

But then a car stopped. Two windows rolled down, a black dog poking its head out the back. Greeting us from the front was Beth Brown. She is the granddaughter of Edith Bond Stearns, who founded the Peterborough Players summer theater in 1933. She is the daughter of Sally Brown, a force of creative will who kept the Players alive through the years, bringing it to where it stands today, one of the premier summer repertory playhouses in New England. As for Beth, she came aboard as the Players’ director of advancement last year.

This narrow downtown stretch in Peterborough, New Hampshire — lined on both sides with street parking — is typically a tight squeeze for drivers, but now there’s nothing but room.

Annie Graves

There were no cars on the street, so Beth simply parked in the middle of the road. I asked if the Players would close for the summer. She sighed. “We don’t know,” she said. “We say to ourselves, ‘Maybe we could do one show. Or two. We could sit people in one row and not the next.’” She shook her head. “We have always found a way. We have to hope the people know how important we are, and they will stand by us.” Then she told us that performers from past seasons, including NYPD Blue star Gordon Clapp, had recorded short videos of hope and appreciation — called “Bright Spots” — that were posted on the Players’ website.

When I arrived home, I clicked on the video from Clapp, who had performed as Robert Frost in a one-man show at the Players. He said he was currently in Vermont, where he was living “in a safe and beautiful place” while the virus roiled New York. He finished by reciting “One Step Backward Taken,” a poem written by Frost after he saw a bridge washed out in a storm, a car teetering on the edge. It ended with these lines:

I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing
And the sun came out to dry me.

Afterward, I thought again about that sense I’d had, that I was living in a place without scenes. I remembered a few mornings ago, Easter Sunday. We live across the road from our town’s lovely stone Episcopal church. At 10, the church bells began ringing out hymns, and then I saw people gathering on the church lawn — not many, maybe 20 — standing apart from each other but still joined, not singing, simply standing in silence, listening to the hymns. After a half hour or so, the group gradually melted away, and soon the lawn and the parking lot were empty, leaving only the flowers on the church steps to stand sentinel.

On Easter morning, a handful of townspeople gather outside the c. 1914 All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Peterborough to listen to the music of the bells.

Annie Graves

Late that afternoon we went to see Annie’s mother at Summerhill, the assisted-living home where she resides. Like so many families with relatives living in these facilities, we can’t visit. Nobody can visit. It is necessary, but difficult. Mary opened the window as we stood outside; because her mother is hard of hearing, Annie spoke to her on the phone even though Mary hovered just a few feet above our heads.

Mary is an artist, and each day she draws fantastic images, her hand still steady at age 93. The form is called Zentangle, and it can be a sort of meditation put to paper. Each piece takes about three days. She will often awaken in the middle of the night and go to her desk, grab her pen, and begin. She has had an art exhibit of her drawings at a gallery and also at Summerhill, and today she held up at least 10 for us to see. She did this in utter silence. Her art has become a world within a world for her.

From the window of her room at an assisted-living home, Annie’s mother, Mary, holds up one of her newest drawings.

Annie Graves

Even as I write this, I realize I will have to adjust my advice to writing students on the importance of scenes. Don’t just look at what is happening in front of you, I need to tell them. Think of what you can find by paying attention. Think of how the simple act of saying hello when a car stops can lead you to an actor reading Frost, or how hearing a bell can let you witness faith when church doors are shut, or how showing up beneath a window can let an artist have her own show for those who matter the most.


April 8, 2020

In the summer of 2017, I traveled to Bucksport, Maine, to give a speech about the importance of community. There, I found a town that was facing the end of a way of life it had known for generations, as the local paper mill had shut down with little warning. I spent a number of days among those whose lives had changed so swiftly, and later I wrote their story for Yankee. I called it “The Town That Refused to Die,” and it began like this: You learn what you’re made of not when life is good, but when the ground beneath your feet gives way, and you are left afraid and uncertain of what to do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those words lately. The ground beneath our feet is unsteady, with each day bringing fresh tremors. Yet everywhere I look, I see people carrying on, finding their way.

There are nine people on Yankee’s editorial team, and as with most offices across the country, we are scattered: one in Massachusetts, one in Vermont, but most of us right here in the Monadnock region of southwestern New Hampshire. We connect through words on a screen, and we see each other on video calls. Four of us are within a few minutes’ walk of one another, yet we ask how everyone’s day is going as if we were all living in far-off places. In a sense, we are.

Left: The town hall peeks through springtime buds in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Right: The marquee outside the shuttered movie theater is now a billboard of gratitude.

Annie Graves

I am noticing small things more than before; I imagine this is happening to many of us. The other day, I counted my steps as I walked the perimeter of my backyard, which ends at the bank of the Contoocook River. If the time comes when we are not allowed to walk freely in town or along the bike path, or on the forested trail, I know that 20 laps around my backyard will get me a mile. Over the weekend, my wife, Annie, and I took our dog for a walk in the woods behind the high school, and in the empty parking lot two young parents were giving their son what looked like his first bike lesson. He was laughing, and that was as welcome a sound as the peepers in the small pond, who in the quiet seemed as loud as geese.

And I am noticing the people I see walking past our house and on the sidewalks downtown. There’s a young woman who walks past our house every morning at roughly the same time. She seems shy and is usually looking at her phone. A few days ago, Annie and I were walking on one side of the street, by the shuttered town library, and the young woman was on the other side. We were the only people in sight on the main street of a town of 6,000. And we waved, and she saw us, and a smile lit up her face. I imagine we will always wave from now on, and maybe she will always smile.

Neither of us wore face masks that day. Yesterday, we both did, along with nearly everyone else we saw: the grocer, a woman by the post office. We nodded at one another, fellow wearers of masks. And in a small town, recognizing neighbors — whether with a nod in passing or a wave from across the street — feels for that moment that we are connected by something bigger than each of us.

Slowing down to notice your hometown can reconnect you with history. Left: A long-overlooked sign commemorates the state’s first water-powered cotton mill, built by the Peterborough Manufacturing Co. in 1809–1810. Right: Nubanusit Brook, which feeds into the Contoocook River, rushes under Main Street.

Annie Graves

These walks mean more than exercise. Nearly every day when we were at Yankee, several of us followed a nearly two-mile loop: up a steep hill, past stone walls, onto a dirt road bordered by trees, then spilling out onto the leafy campus of a private school. Those walks were for getting out, clearing the mind. Now, walks are for looking closely. I noticed that a magnolia tree overlooking the river is about to blossom. For the first time in years, I paused to actually read the historical sign by the thundering waterfall that marks the site of the first water-powered cotton mill in New Hampshire.

Today Annie and I saw a box outside the back entrance of the town library. It sat beside a container filled with hundreds of homemade masks, all waiting to be distributed. Inside the box were dozens of copies of a 40-page stapled booklet titled “Socially Distanced/Connected by Community: A Personal Journal of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Monadnock Region.” Free for the taking, these blank journals are being offered by the local historical society, which hopes to collect residents’ accounts of these shared days and weeks. According to the sign on the box, organizers hope that one day, long into the future, “the people of the Monadnock region will be able to hear our voices, learn the ways the community pulled together (while staying six feet apart!), experience our disappointments and triumphs, and see the ways we persevered.”

Outside the closed library in downtown Peterborough, a box of free journals has been left to help spark a community history of the pandemic.

Annie Graves

I hope the children of today will come read these journals when they are ready — maybe in 20 or 30 years, when they have families of their own. They will see what all of us know to be true, even on a hard day: In time the ground settled, and we learned what we are made of. They made it through. We made it through.


April 1, 2020

It was nearly dark when I finally left the Yankee office last Friday. New Hampshire’s governor had ordered all nonessential businesses to close until May 4, and even though in our hearts we feel our work is essential for anyone who finds solace in stories about the spirit and beauty and endurance of New England, we understood. And our staffers are continuing to tell those stories — though now from our homes, each of us connected through what I am convinced is sorcery.

By late afternoon Friday the parking lot was all but empty, yet I lingered. I had stacked a small mountain of Yankee volumes beside the copier and was picking through them, looking for those stories whose inspirational message would never grow old. Our associate editor, Joe Bills, hung in there with me, carrying volumes to a second machine to help copy my selections. In the end, when I drove away I had a box filled with stories of endurance and resilience that I hoped would brighten not only readers’ days, but also my own.

When I walked into the house carrying the box, there was a sound coming from the living room that I had not heard for a few years: the purring thrum of the Italian-made Necchi sewing machine that my wife’s mother had bought in 1953. And behind which now sat my wife, Annie. (“The machine weighs as much as a small car, and there was a fair amount of shoving and a dangerous moment of lifting, before it came to rest on the dining room table,” Annie wrote later on Facebook.) Beside the machine, she had laid a small pile of brown calico decorated with flowers, which she had retrieved from her mother’s box of fabrics and was using — like many others here in town and around the nation — to sew masks for hospital and nursing home employees.

More than six decades after it was made, a family heirloom (left) has been called back into service to make masks (right) to donate to healthcare workers and others on the front lines.

Annie Graves

The next day, I learned that a local man who had once fixed up and sold vintage sewing machines had come out of retirement during this crisis and was repairing machines throughout the area at no charge. Now, the sound of that antique Necchi downstairs from my home office reminds me that even when we feel helpless to control the big stuff, we can still find our voice to say, “This is what I can do.” And when millions find the same voice, it does make a difference with the big stuff.

My wife’s mother, Mary, is 93 years old and lives at an assisted-living facility called Summerhill about a mile from our house. Our routine for several years has included a short Sunday drive with her to a local eatery, usually a diner. Of course, that has ended for now; the residents of Summerhill can no longer leave their rooms. It is hard on them, hard on their families, but everyone knows why this is needed.

After snow fell in New Hampshire last week, the community relations coordinator at Summerhill, a woman named Jean Kundert, started making snowmen for the residents, whose windows provide their only link to the outdoors. When Jean finished a few hours later, 42 snowmen faced those windows. Later, on her nightly phone call with Annie, Mary laughed as she told about seeing the snowmen, her voice sounding light as a child’s — which for a few minutes that day she was.

Wearing signs that say things like “Laugh” and “We Love You,” an army of cheerful snowmen lines up in front of an assisted-living facility in New Hampshire.

Annie Graves

Stories of hope, and of people going to extraordinary lengths to help each other, are our lifeline to a more normal future, whether that lies a month ahead or two, or well into the days of summer heat and tomatoes ripening in our gardens. For today, my sign of hope is an amaryllis plant. Annie brought it home three years ago from the recycling center, where it had been dumped into the compost heap out back. She placed it in the sunlight, beside windows facing east and south. She watered it, believing in the power of nurturing. The green shoots grew — one foot, two, three — but never a flower.

Last night? Well, last night this is what happened.


March 25, 2020

The snow fell heavy and wet on Monday night, and we woke up to trees wearing a blanket of winter white. It was really quite lovely, and even though spring had arrived and I would have welcomed having grass to mow and a garden to till, there was something comforting in being out at 7 a.m. shoveling. The sheer normalcy of flinging snow off the car with my mittened hands and clearing a landing spot in the yard for Rudy, our fiery Jack Russell terrier, made the world seem, for that hour or so, quite ordinary. And for that I was grateful.

My colleagues here at Yankee are now working on our July/August issue, and our daily newsletters, and our constant outreach on social media. Sometimes it may seem as if this stuff just happens, as if by magic, but it doesn’t. And I want you to know the names of two of the people working hard behind the scenes: Aimee Tucker, our senior digital editor, and Katherine Keenan, our associate digital editor. They understand that they are building a bridge that spans the country, even farther, and whenever someone takes joy in making a recipe they send out, or scrolls slowly through the beautiful New England photos they feature on Instagram — well, in moments like those, they have given all of us a kind of landing spot.

The May/June issue, which we finished last week, will soon arrive in mailboxes around the country, filled with stories about paying a visit to Atlantic puffins on their rocky Maine island home, experiencing the magnificence of a windjammer under sail, celebrating the tradition of New England summer theater. These stories seem as if they belong to a different place, another time. And we all know they do. When we planned the May/June issue so many months ago, we talked in the halls about the summer ahead, the Red Sox, and whether Tom Brady could win one more Super Bowl.

So here we are. We remain at our post, but our task has shifted. We are looking for that delicate balance between acknowledging that we all feel anxious about what happens next, while still working to bring the beauty and blessings of ordinary life to you, wherever you are.

A few days ago, I heard from one of Yankee’s contributing writers who lives in northern Vermont. He wrote that he saw the year’s first red-winged blackbird in his yard, and that the maple sap was still running, and that a friend who was anxious about the headlines also had lambs on the way—and lambs won’t wait until the world is on an even keel again. This writer was saying when you simply look around, you can find timeless comforts even in the most trying times.

I also recently came across a Facebook post by a gifted local singer-songwriter, Wendy Keith, who plays all through the Monadnock region and beyond. Her new CD just came out — Wendy Keith and Her Alleged Band — and yes, I plugging her record here. Why? Because when my wife read her post, tears welled in her eyes and she shook her head, and I realized that even these dark days bring unexpected bursts of light. Here is some of what Wendy wrote:

It’s been 30 years, no, maybe 40 since I rode a bike. I’m not sure. It’s been a long while.

Today, here on Sanibel Island in Florida, where although it’s the month of March, it feels like July back where I come from in New England.

But today I made the little extra effort to do something that frightened me, and I know this sounds a bit silly, but hey, I’m 65 and almost 66, and falling has greater ramifications than it did when I was 20 or 30 or even 40.

Today I felt like I was 10 or 12 again and I tried something that felt virtually new again. I got on a bike and rode. And it’s true; it’s just like riding a bike.

When I was a child, my dad taught me how to ride the amazing two-wheeler…. He talked me into feeling confident, gave me a running push, and did the hardest thing parents ever have to do, he let me go. I was feeling so excited and adventurous that once I got going, I spontaneously thought I might get tricky and began to waggle my handlebars back and forth. I vaguely heard him say I shouldn’t do that because I might fall, when the pavement came suddenly up to meet me…. Boom — I crashed. This I remember well. I don’t remember getting up again, but certainly I did. I lived to ride another day.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped riding bikes. I grew up, went through college, met a man, married, and had children. I taught children how to ride bikes, how to drive cars; they grew up and moved on.

Now I am older. I have a grandchild who has yet to ride a two-wheeler. He will before too long and sometime he may fall.

And this season is radically different…. Radical and unfamiliar changes are taking place constantly, daily, minute to minute. Courage, faith, and simple daily tasks have become challenging, and being far from home right now is surreal and unsteadying….

We are in a small, private cottage on a long-planned trip, taking precautions to isolate and physically distance ourselves to the best of our ability. We drove on this trip, which gave us a sense of security and control at least over our transportation. Not much else has been normal. Restaurants are shut down now and an order has just been given to close all lodgings in the Florida Keys, not far from here, so we could be next to be told to pack our bags and go home.

But today we put on some sunscreen … and went outside and got on bikes and went for a ride. In a remarkable way, I was suddenly 12 again. I felt the wind on my face. I pedaled and balanced and loosened my grip and rode down the road like a pro…. I found myself riding all around the neighborhood, then down the bigger road and all around and around the nearby neighborhood. And it had a bell. I rang the bell.

Life is often so much about context and perspective. You, my friend, can draw any conclusions you like from this tale of my day in this troubled time. Today I got back on that bike.

The post Mel Allen’s Letter from Dublin appeared first on New England Today.


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