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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
376 Brush Hill Road, Milton, Massachusetts – Part I
We moved to 376 Brush Hill Road in September of 1956. I was nine years old, and my youngest sister, Karen, had just been born. She was kept in the hospital a few extra days so my parents could get us moved in before they brought the new baby home. Her imminent birth was what…
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…
from writer to author
It wasn’t until I finished writing a book that I discovered the big challenge was not—as I had assumed—the planning, the research, and the writing. No. The biggest barrier to becoming a published author was finding a publisher. I had been getting paid for writing all my adult life. But always, the writing was on…
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…
I’m still peeking into–and tossing away–old calendars. What a difference a decade makes! In 1984, the nest was somewhat empty (A recent college grad camped out on the third floor is not a child who needs driving around or taking care of—and is actually pretty nice to have around.) And I was cutting back on freelance work….