This Month’s Featured Articles…

Our trip to France was planned for late March 2020. My younger brother, Michael, and I needed to get over to see our mother in the Maison de Retraite that she had been transported to the previous December because her cognitive deterioration made it impossible for her to live on her own any more. She had moved to France on her own over 20 years earlier to live in the small but charming house that her mother had built in the French Pyrenees. It seemed an idyllic [...]

One of the most impossibly difficult aspects of the human experience is not only death itself, nor comprehending the idea that those we love will at some point no longer be with us, but how our enduring ability to love transforms death into something tragically beautiful. When the car Shea Cohn, age 16, was riding in on Route 44 going into Canaan, CT, crossed over the median and into the path of an oncoming pickup truck on the evening of March 27 of 2020, his [...]

In 2018, when Republican Senator Kathy Marchione announced that she would not seek re-election in Senate District 43, the news immediately raised the collective temperature on a seat suddenly in play for a traditionally competitive district. But for Marchione’s eventual successor Daphne Jordan – competition is in her DNA. As a competitive swimmer, softball and college lacrosse player, Senator Jordan has become accustomed to taking more than a few lumps throughout her life, coming back after each challenge and delivering a few of her own. [...]

Consider the following exchange I had with “Joe,” the owner of an unnamed inn in the western Adirondacks: It was roughly 9am, and I was waiting for Joe’s wife, who served as hostess, waitress, chef, and (remarkably, still) a charming bartender, to put the finishing touches on the meat lover’s omelet that I had ordered nigh on an hour earlier. It happened to be Joe’s birthday, a coincidence he downplayed by pointing out that he was still “working,” an evident euphemism for ensconcing himself at [...]

Mark Twain is credited with the pronouncement that “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Truth is that the judgement was first rendered 38 years after Twain’s death … but the presumption continues. True or not, the balance to that invective might well be that Art Omi in Ghent, NY, is “A great walk made amazing.” Monumental sculptures that delight and engage The evolved concept of literary agent and entrepreneur Francis Greenburger, the 120-acre reserve is a series of winding trails, gentle streams, and an explosion [...]