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A Mute and Elegant Testimony
My pretty mother wore a grey vertical striped shirtwaist dress the day she brought my little brother home from the hospital. As she knelt in front of us with her tender white bundle,…
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The Woman in the Glass
This ad for a designer faucet stopped me in my tracks. I have felt this way most of my life. Well, at least since I first dipped into Little Women, Jane Eyre, Wuthering…
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The Warner House
I dragged three unwitting participants with me to the Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday. My goal was to see a bedspread. Long on my unofficial bucket list was to view the Betsy…
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The Novel of a Wardrobe
The Novel of a Wardrobe is the title of a lovely Parisian exhibit that just closed. It was housed in the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Paris history. From 1902 through the 1920’s,…
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When the music stopped
My mother and father were high school sweethearts who married and had children young. One benefit to having parents ten years younger than my friends’ parents was that music always played at our house. …
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The Way She Looks Tonight
I picked up “The Way She Looks Tonight” while staying in my friend Karen’s guest room in Rochester last month. It looked like a light read that would lull me back to sleep…
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Married women will still have their favorites…
Letter from Sarah Haley, Newburyport to Nabby Angell, Boston ~ June 2, 1777 Dear Cousin Nabby, May I flatter myself, My Dear Girl, that a letter from a sober matron, quite removed from…
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Live as well as you dare…..
I happened upon the Letter from Sydney Smith to Lady Georgianna Morpeth, 1820, and it so aptly advises what to do in the melancholoy times that come to all of us. My favorite…
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Blithewold
A rainy, dark day found my daughter and I touring Blithewold Mansion in Bristol, Rhode Island. Because of the weather we were the only visitors at the mansion for the two hours we…
