Tonight I’m off to watch some more BBC with my friend Catherine Stryker. We’ve been watching a trilogy based on novels by Michael Dobbs starring Ian Richardson: House of Cards, To Play the King, and The Final Cut. The incomparable Ian Richardson play Francis Urquhart (pronounced UR-ket), known to his […]
The goldfinches love our new thistle seed feeders. They’re not as colorful in winter. And everybody loves sunflower seeds. My flash kept bouncing off the glass, so I had to open the porch door to take this guy’s picture. He didn’t care; just went right on eating.
We’ve had a little sunshine here lately, and it has been greatly appreciated. Everybody’s lots more cheery. I lost my mom last fall, so I noticed the direct connection between moms and sunshine. My instinctive reaction, when I see the sunshine, is this internal tape recording of my mom saying, […]
I’m having enormous fun with The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Not the movie with Barbara Stanwyck; the book by Grace Zaring Stone. It’s set in the treaty ports of China, in 1911, I think. Here we have troops from all over the European empires guarding the International Settlement — […]
I heard a very moving presentation last night at Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield: Sally and Donald Goodrich, founders of the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, shown here with scholarship students from Afghanistan. Sally and Donald lost their son Peter on September 11, 2001. He was on flight 175, the second […]
My cousin Christopher Todd Hartshorne passed away yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly, much too soon. The news hasn’t really sunk in. It was like that with my mom last Fall. The grief didn’t really register until I looked at her watch and her glasses by her bedside and realized she would […]
I’ve been wrapped up in The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler about the slave rebellion led by Spartacus. I just googled Koestler and it turns out he’s a disillusioned communist And like Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine) and George Orwell (Animal Farm), he wrote an anti-communist novel called Darkness at Noon, […]
We’ve had a great response to the black oil seeds we’ve been putting on the porch rail, with lots of celebrity guests. I think that’s a red-bellied woodpecker on top, and our flashy friend the cardinal. I’m trying to get a good shot of my favorite celebrity, the lady cardinal, […]
