I’m not alone in hating spiders. According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute arachnophobia ranks third — right behind fear of public speaking and fear of death — among the country’s top phobias. Approximately 30 percent of all Americans are plagued by it. I won’t go into detail about when my fear of arachnids began — though it involved my first night away from home and a top bunk inches...
I planted Globemaster alliums three or four years ago. They’re the largest and most majestic plant from the ornamental side of the large allium family which includes chives, onions, shallots, leeks, and hundreds of wild and cultivated species. (Not surprisingly, allium is the Latin word for garlic.) In full bloom, Globemasters form 6 to 8-inch perfectly rounded heads which look like purple...
It’s been another passive-aggressive spring in southern New England. Showing up weeks late, spring arrived in a tremendous rush this year — trailing swarms of insects and rapidly pushing the temperatures up into the eighties. The daffodils and tulips which had been dozing under a blanket of snow were shaken rudely awake and forced into flower almost overnight. As a result, my spring bulbs which...
One grey day in the frozen depths of winter, I saw a flash of gold in the woods behind our place: fox! It moved with a wonderful fluidity and sense of purpose, but wary and close to the ground. Later, my husband thought he saw it again —disappearing down the old woodchuck hole in the underbrush — but then months went by without another sighting.
Galway Kinnell, one of America’s most honored and beloved poets, died last October at the age of 87. He was a physically imposing man — with a tough-guy face that belied a gentle and generous nature. He believed that the job of poets was to bear witness. “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to...
My witch hazel shrub is flowering — the blooms flamboyant bursts of yellow and red, like miniature pom poms, cheering on springtime’s long-delayed kick-off. Besides an almost imperceptible blur of red in the underbrush and a shimmer of gold among the willow wands, it’s the only bright color in our otherwise stubbornly monotone landscape. Witch hazels are native to America and perfectly at home in...
Here’s a guest posting that I hope adds a touch of levity to these last grey days of March: Walking along the shore of Captiva Island the other day, who should I bump into but my old teacher Linnaeus Zandtdahler. In case the name escapes you, Zandtdahler happens to be the world’s leading shell taxonomist and a figure of such renown in his field that even though he has retired professionally...
Anne Morrow Lindbergh — aviator, author, and wife of Charles Lindbergh — wrote Gift from the Sea sixty years ago on Florida’s Captiva Island. Nobody knows exactly which cottage she lived in when she wrote the eloquent meditation on and for women that would become an international bestseller, but I know it must have been near to where we’re staying now. Captiva is only a little over one square...
Preserved lemons, the key ingredient in many Moroccan and Indian dishes, are lemons that have been pickled in a salty brine with various other spices and fermented for several months before using. They have a uniquely tart and intensely lemony taste. I first came upon them when my sister, working then as personal trainer, took on the well-known New York caterer Serena Bass as a client. Serena...
I had the good fortune of getting to know Daniel Hoffman in the final years of his life. I was invited to join a group he had organized that got together for dinner periodically to read poems aloud. He was in his late eighties then — and still writing. He would bring new poems, as well as old ones, to our dinners and read them in an off-hand, conversational tone that belied the hidden...
Not long ago, my husband and I attended a memorial service where the song “Morning Has Broken” was sung by an a cappella group. The voices filled the sunlit New England church where we were sitting with a sense of pure joy. Perhaps best known in its incarnation as a Cat Stevens hit in the early 1970s, it’s a hauntingly beautiful song that sounds as old as time. So I was surprised to learn that...
by Richard Wilbur Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a...
There’s nothing quite as tempting and delicious at a cocktail party as a handful of mixed nuts that have been roasted and spiced, though it’s unlikely you’ll be able stop at just one handful. My sister-in-law Beverly, a first-class cook and the embodiment of Southern hospitality, seems to travel with a tin of these nuts — freshly roasted and redolent of spices— wherever she goes. Luckily for us...
for Ros Krauss Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able...