I knew things were going to get hard when the library closed. I am, by profession, a writer and a professor of storytelling. I’ve read to my twin children—now four—since their infancy. But as avid readers as we already were, 2020 upped our reading quotient, and markedly. Without the library to turn to, mid-March found …
Kingston, a small city in upstate New York, became my home four and a half years ago. Seeking space, affordability, green, and quiet, my husband and I traded Brooklyn for this city of 23,000. Unwittingly, we joined a slow-drip migration north. Since the arrival of coronavirus, though, what had been a steadily paced increase in …
The first thing you see is the church steeple. It appears almost like an apparition, a slender point of white rising up from the rolling mound of dark, dark green, mile upon mile of spruce forest. You rub your eyes, look again, squinting through the salty spray of the Gulf of Maine. Yes, it’s there, …
As the reality of the coronavirus outbreak settled upon us in mid-March, I felt many things: anxious, privileged, uncertain, enraged, lucky, frightened and exhausted. But I did not feel grateful. The word has long rankled me, though never have I found it as grating as in the first couple weeks of lockdown, and again as …
Seeding a Dark World with New Life On Saturday, March 14, the day after public schools and our twin three years olds’ daycare closed in our Hudson Valley town, I sent the kids to their sitter one final time, frantic for a couple hours to get a few things done before I turned myself over to …
In May of 1948, a young woman named Judith Bailey embarked upon what was meant to be a three-week vacation in Italy and France. Nearly a year later, she posted a letter to her parents, who were baffled as to why their daughter—who had been given all the opportunities of a privileged New York City …
The Alentejo region is Portugal‘s largest, covering much of the southern third of the country, and its least densely populated. The terrain varies wildly — from vineyards and rolling farmland dotted with cattle to sprawling, shadowy groves of cork trees — and the culture is rooted deeply in land and sea. Nearly everyone in Portugal …
I sat in the passenger seat of Sylvia De Marco’s jeep as we wound uphill on a road flanked by untamed foliage. It was November of 2019, and I had just arrived on Vieques after a short but breathtaking flight from San Juan. De Marco, a designer and the proprietor of the Dreamcatcher, a hotel on …
I hadn’t bathed in days. I’d finally managed to squeeze in a little exercise — between trips to the grocery store and the pharmacy and to buy dog food, and a return to the pharmacy for the prescription I had to call the doctor to remind him to refill — but not a shower. My …
Judith Jones, the legendary Knopf editor who died in 2017, is considered by many to be one of the forebears of modern American food culture. After publishing Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 1961, she spent the next 50-plus years nurturing the likes of Marcella Hazan, Irene Kuo, James Beard, Claudia Roden, …