O suns and skies and clouds of June, And flowers of June together, Ye cannot rival for one hour October’s bright blue weather… It’s the kind of brisk, newly pressed autumn day my mother would have chosen to recite the above lines. They’re from one of a dozen or so poems she knew by heart, along with Longfellow’s ‘The Children’s Hour’ and ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ — verses that she had learned...
Every neighborhood in Paris has its own open-air “marché volant” which literally means “flying market” because it seems to pop up magically a couple of times a week around 8:00 in the morning and then disappear again without a trace a little past noon. It is here under canvas tarps and among wooden stalls that you’ll discover the choicest fruits and vegetables, the freshest fish, poultry, and...
The poet Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006) summered in Provincetown for nearly 50 years where, over the decades, he built an extensive and apparently magnificent garden. His first collection of poems was published in 1930 and he continued to write through his very long and productive life. He was a beloved teacher and, as a judge of the Yale Younger Writers series, influenced the careers of many...
I thought they’d all left for the season, but as I was cutting some basil in the vegetable garden at sunset I heard the unmistakable sound of a hummingbird — a soft but insistent vroom! noise not unlike that of a toddler playing with a toy car. I turned around, hoping to find it — in the zinnias? among the nasturiums? — but it was already gone. It was almost as if it had come to say goodbye.
In 1908, a 400-foot, five-arch concrete trolley bridge was built to span the Deerfield River between the Massachusetts’ towns of Shelburne Falls and Buckland. Abandoned in 1928 as it became more economical to haul goods by truck, the span was transformed a year later by the Shelburne Falls Woman’s Club into “The Bridge of Flowers.”
One of the largest and most beautiful water ways in the Berkshires, the Stockbridge Bowl was originally known as Lake Makeenac which means “home of the Mahekanus,” a tribe of Mohicans whose council fires once burned along its shores. Though the lake is now rimmed with over 450 cottages, Kripalu (the world famous yoga and wellness center), and Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony...