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376 Brush Hill Road – Part VII – The Barn

September 13, 2022

The barn was a place we kids liked to explore. It was (technically speaking) a carriage house, but to us it was always “the barn.” We were told it was moved to the site. (From where? I don’t know.) The entrance, as expected was a giant, heavy sliding door (old cracked green paint), three or…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part VI- Critters

September 11, 2022

Hats off to my mother when I ponder how she survived those first months in that house. For there were certain aspects of our new home she found unnerving. (Understandably so!) There were so many squirrels scampering around the yard, she said, that they made her nervous when she went out to hang laundry on…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part V – Let There Be Light

September 10, 2022

This house was definitely designed with the goal of letting in as much natural light as possible–with more than fifty windows (all of them as large as possible for their places), a sun porch, a sleeping porch, and windows in all exterior doors (except for the one in the cellar). The double front doors were…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part IV – The Third Floor

September 9, 2022

Servants. We children (appropriately agog) were told that the third floor was originally the domain of servants. Nobody knows how many. And that was why the bathroom at the top of the stairs was so different from the one on the second floor: claw foot tub, basic white sink, bead board wainscoting rather than ceramic…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part III – The Cellar

September 8, 2022

To open the cellar door was to enter a very different world. The stairs, narrow, worn boards, unfinished and uneven, took you down to an open, mostly unfinished space. The house, on its foundation of giant field stones, was built into a slight slope, so the cellar was deep and dark toward the front, but…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part II – First Impressions

September 7, 2022

I remember running through the house more than once during those weeks when the sale was being negotiated. Its spaciousness was mind-boggling. This was not just a house. It was “a mansion.” Both upstairs and down, the three rooms across the front of the house had windowed bays. The front hall was a full-size room…

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Charles Norman Shay

July 22, 2022

On Omaha Beach, at Saint Lauren sur Mer, France, a turtle-shaped memorial honors the 175 Native Americans who participated in the D-Day invasion. It is dedicated to Master Sgt. Charles Normand Shay, a much decorated veteran of both World War II and Korea. He was a teenager when he served as platoon medic for Fox…

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Shouldn’t we all be curious?

September 9, 2021

A couple of weeks ago my daughter asked me what book she could read to help her understand what’s going on in The Middle East. Ha! One book? My instant response was to ask her which Middle East she wanted to understand: Israel and the Palestinian conflict? Syria and its civil war? Yemen and its…

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