Mountain Roads, Sing Me Home
As we pulled out of the drive, the dashboard clock read 5:18a.m. It was dark in Ohio, and we were bound homeward. While the baby slept strapped into the backseat, the sun rose along the fields and...
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Weathering the Books
If this were Facebook, you’d read that “Rebecca Martin is happy Agatha Christie was so prolific.” Summer is for detective stories. Every year, just about the same time, the air gets hot, the trees turn...
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A Neighborly Kind of Quiet
Six and some odd years ago, I downsized. I’d grown up in one of the biggest Atlanta suburbs, and gone to school in the small city of Athens, Georgia. It was time to move on. I began my slow progress...
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All that We Can’t Leave Behind
Our dining room table is a salvaged antique store find. It is worn and old, weighty and substantial, and in need of a good refinishing job. Vintage mid-century, its peculiarity is a pair of oak leaves...
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The Isness of Art
In downtown Hanover, New Hampshire, there is a gallery that carries local and regional art: the League of NH Craftsmen Gallery. You can enter the front door at Lebanon Street and find yourself in a...
View ArticleStaying Awake
It started with LOST. It was a revelation: Action-packed, prime time adventure television could be really, really good. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy my fair share of T.V. storylines that boast big...
View ArticleThe Bearable Lightness of Letting Go
Undeterred by the cold and rainy weather, they came. Car after car, every passenger door flung open, each woman leaping out to scan the tables, hawk-eyed, grasping the best pillow or wine glass or...
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Other Wizards, Many Worlds
We all know which child wizard first grabbed his Elementary Spells textbook and walked the castle hallways to Magical History 101, right? Not necessarily. Decades before J.K. Rowling put Harry and Ron...
View ArticleShire Reckonings
“What fun! What fun to be off again, off on the road with dwarves! This is what I have been really longing for, for years! Goodbye!’ he said, looking at his old home and bowing to the door.” ~ Bilbo...
View ArticleChimneys Dark & Spirits Bright
This post was originally published last December. On the eve of Christmas’s reemergence in England,Charles Dickens and Washington Irving began a correspondence. It’s no secret, especially at this time...
View ArticleTry Again: On Follow-up Attempts
When J.K. Rowling published her latest novel, The Casual Vacancy, back in September, many of her devoted readers wanted to know where the magic—overt or otherwise—had gone. The expectation was...
View ArticleIn Praise of Nursery Tale Anthropomorphism
Animal stories are the stuff of an imaginative child’s delight: Kenneth Grahame’s Ratty and Mole, C.S. Lewis’s beaver family, Beatrix Potter’s Benjamin Bunny. In these stories, impossibility is key....
View ArticlePermission to Not Talk
I was such a good secretary. Just enough Myers Briggs “I” and “P” to synthesize ideas and data, not so much OCD that I couldn’t stop mid-project to talk with a visitor. And Google? Put any question to...
View ArticleWatching for Trains
The first train station in Lynchburg, Virginia, was built in the 1850s, but the tracks were laid before that. They shipped – sometimes folks, sometimes freight – straight past here from New York to...
View ArticleCertain Tides
This piece was originally published in Equals Volume 1: Exploration in Fall 2013. They built against sound advice, or so the story goes. The vulnerable stretch of shore was too changeable for...
View ArticleSafe as Houses
When I was young, I buried myself deep in the attic corner, huddled under layers of quilts beneath dusty rafters bowing to midnight winds. After a while, I would creep downstairs for a cup of hot cocoa...
View ArticleA Halfway Review of a Sometime Farmer
“Do you remember Noel Perrin driving his eco-car around town?” I ask. My husband laughs, “Yes.” “What color was it?” “Red,” he says. He pauses and thinks some more. “Definitely red.” I open my laptop...
View ArticleWhy We Need the Olympics in Brazil
“It does not make sense to be extravagant in this moment.” The opening ceremony for the Olympics is on, and the creative team explains that it will be a low-tech show. “We have a message, and it’s not...
View ArticleRacism 101
“Have you heard of Nikki Giovanni?” I ask, and the woman volunteering at the sponsorship table at a local event laughs. She is African-American, and she laughs, “Do I know Nikki Giovanni? Do you know...
View ArticleThe Stories of Others
In the 1960s, child psychologist Robert Coles treated Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old black girl integrating a white elementary school in New Orleans. Coles would hate my use of the word “treated.”...
View ArticleHere, Now
“Come join the shopping spree!” With this exhortation, the woman at a table near mine greets her friend who is approaching the cafe area of the bookstore, the third friend in the group to arrive. The...
View ArticlePrepare Yourself
“There was so much blood!” The urologist is downright gleeful. “The nurses were totally freaked out!” This is in hindsight, and he wasn’t even there. He heard the story second-hand, after being called...
View ArticleWhite Christmas
The screen brightens as the camera pans down. The sound of strings, pianissimo, brightly, in a major key. Snowy hills, treetops, a perfect, tiny village nestled in a cozy mountain valley. The strings...
View ArticleTen Moments When Words Struck Home
…there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light...
View ArticlePortrait of Anna Hyatt Huntington
Not a lady you Stand like a casual god and Fashion with your hands a man Out of clay, Strong man-hands Pressing, your forward knee catching your Balance, at rest, at your Work, your war, I see The...
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