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  Welcome!! On this site you will find work in progress and published work from the last fifty-five years. It is, in essence, an archive of published and unpublished work. I have tried to indicate the date each piece was first written and the date it was revised and published, either here or by some other means. This selection includes, or will include essays on education and nature, poems,  memoirs, travel logs, stories and random thoughts. There are  four  categories, including Memoirs, Nature, Nova Scotia and Travel.  My literary career began in approximately 1946, when I became the editor of our school newspaper, The Mock Turtle. It was a proper newsletter, printed on rather dingy white paper by that modern wonder, a mimeograph machine with a hand crank, which tended to go rogue and spit either ink or paper around the room. But it was a proper Newsletter with a picture of the Mock Turtle  on the masthead borrowed from Edward Tenniel, and a byline from  one of the psalms, “…the voic
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Recent posts

The Truth About Warblers

Warblers are irritating, and that’s the truth. It’s a beautiful spring morning, the mist just disappearing and the sun promising a full Monty. I take my binoculars and stroll quietly down to the mailboxes and, just like yesterday, there is a yellow warbler singing full bore, "whichety, whichety, whichety." Where? Must be right there in that bush. But I can’t see it. No. Have I ever seen that bird there? No. She/he flits from branch to branch veiled by the baby yellow-green leaves of spring, barely hatched. The sound has moved. I try to scan with the binoculars. The sound is close, here by my ear, no, over there to the right, "whitchety, whitchety, whichetey…" out of the corner of my right eye I see a tease of yellow.   Ok, be like that. I’ll try another spot. I walk slowly up the trail, listening for sound, looking for another swipe of yellow, or any color on the wing, and at the crest of the hill, right there on the lowest branch of the big maple, right where t
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A Maple Branch

  When my friend Phyllis looked out a window she saw a painting. This morning I looked out a window and saw a painting: The leaves on a branch of the maple tree, green, filigreed, And quivering, yes, but with the sun upon them,   pure gold not the whole tree, just the branch of a tree,   reaching out in front of a forest of trees,   an army of greens, marching in place. Catching the occassional ray of sun,   Moving as the breeze moves the burnished leaves intricately cut and alive waved to me with a tease of the breeze, golden from a brush of the sun.   Phyllis painted, not the tops, nor the bottoms   but whatever part of a tree might be captured within the limitations of a   window frame. It was the frame that made the picture , the frame and the skill of the painter. Fingers bent and twisted could hardly grasp the paintbrush,   (Phyllis had rheumatoid arthritis). But sense of color sharp to the end , they applied paint to suggest wonder and
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That first summer, June 1968

I was unprepared for the beauty of a June day on the La Have islands: old homesteads surrounded with perennials: daffodils waving bravely in a fierce wind; narcissus decorating  stone outcroppings and perfuming the air; blooming lilacs drawing in as much of the surrounding land as they could manage in a year and so slowly eating up the paths and fields around them; wood trails carpeted with  four petaled bunch berry, the white petals morphing into red berries by winter.   I was unprepared for just about everything that first summer in Nova Scotia. The previous summer we had traveled by VW bus like a mess of itinerant gypsies to stay   in my sister’s house on Bell Island. I had two small children, my English mother-in-law and an increasingly difficult case of morning sickness; Simon had a broken wrist and his arm in a cast but managed, nonetheless, to put the small sailboat   we were trailing behind the bus into the water and sail off (literally) single-handed to explore the islands
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Unlocking the Chambers of Possibility -- Antioch Commencement, May 1995

Just ten years ago this month I sat in the audience  at  SUNY  Cortland and listened to my son, Richard, deliver the  Valedictorian's  address  to  6000 people.  I was  overwhelmed  with maternal pride,  heightened by my absolute  conviction  that  I  could  never  do  anything like that.   After all, I failed  Freshman  Speech  three  times  when  I  was  in  college  and  I  always get  collywobbles  every  time  I have  to  stand up in public. Asking a question in Town Meeting is a  rare  act  of  courage,  and  addressing  fifty entering P.D.. students · isn't easy. But learning from our children  -  and  our clients - - and our  experiences;  doing  things  we never  thought we could do - is what this talk is about -- unlocking the chambers of possibility.   In that speech   te n   years   ag o   Richar d   said: W e hav e a dut y t o care abou t · our environment, to care about the nuclear weapons stand-off, to care about seemingly meaningless war
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