“She wanted a home, and that was how it began.” So opens an essay by Annie Eliza Pidgeon Searing, published 100 years ago in House Beautiful. In her 1921 essay, Searing recounted her journey—scrappy, drawn-out, and often carried by little more than a hope and a prayer—about the old stone cottage at 142 Pearl Street …
Anniversaries have a way of stirring up feelings so dormant and subconscious we aren’t even aware we harbor them, and this month, I’ve been overcome. By grief, yes, and agitation, too. Not the acute anxiety that gripped me for the first months of the pandemic, nor the exhaustion and resignation that set in over the …
Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original (University of North Carolina Press) was published in 2018, and was released in paperback February of this year. Sara B. Franklin, the editor of the book, and Diep Tran, a chef and food writer, talked about the enduring, yet largely unsung, historical legacy of Miss Edna …
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 …