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...