July 27, 2017
Last night I got the kids in bed and went outside to watch the bats.
Our old farmhouse has an attic -- an apparently insecure attic -- with gaps between the rafters and tiny spots where bats can slip in and find a place to sleep. During the day, you would never know they were there, but once the sun is gone from the sky, the bats go to work.
As dusk settles in and the sky turns pinky, then midnight blue, one little black form a...
July 1, 2017
As a ten- ,eleven- and twelve-year-old reader, I was obsessed with James Herriot. I read and reread and reread again every one of his humorous and ultimately reassuring tales of life as a large animal vet in Yorkshire in the 1940s and 50s. While Herriot's character descriptions -- both human and animal -- are the element of craft for which he's best known, I always found equal satisfaction in his descriptions of the Yorkshire dales.
I thought of m...
June 8, 2017
I've always loved Dublin's Grand Canal, a watery path meandering through a succession of southside neighborhoods before heading out through inland Ireland to meet up with the River Shannon. I'd experienced the canal in bits and pieces before but on this trip I was writing a piece about the canal and I wanted to spend a bit more time along its banks. So I walked the canal from the Grand Canal Dock to the neighborhood of Dolphin's Barn, heading int...
June 2, 2017
I'm traveling in Ireland this week and spent yesterday fighting jet lag and checking in with some of my favorite spots in Dublin, one of my very favorite places in the world. When I lived here in the 1990s, I loved walking on the wide, watery stretch of Sandymount Strand and along the Poolbeg Penninsula. The light rain and fresh sea air were just the thing for my travel-addled head and I walked and remembered and looked forward to the week ahead....
