After a recent trip to a southern city where no one wears fleece, I took a moment to reflect upon my Maine mud season couture. (This involved a certain amount of sighing.) Things have gone downhill since I worked in public relations at a Boston hospital, when I dressed up every day. Now I work…

This is the first post that I’ve written—the first real writing I’ve done, actually—since my mother passed away at the beginning of February. She had been sick with cancer for over a decade. I will never forget where I was when I found out she had cancer. I was in the Hillman Library at the…

A woman stands at the front of the bookstore now, holding in her hand, like a teacup, a slate-thin portable device. She is warm and inviting and beckons everyone over to her station, as though they are old acquaintances, come to call. Finger sandwiches, tea napkins, and a vase full of violets could sit on…

The stones are gray and sandy brown, scoured and pitted and cracked by time and salt air. During my week here, the sky stays a pale, cold blue. The North Sea is surprisingly calm. Long diagonal ridges of rock—craigs, the Scots call them—expose themselves like bony spines at low tide and slip underwater at high.…

As soon as I settled into my theater seat to watch 127 Hours, I felt uneasy. Why had I decided to spend the next ninety minutes of my afternoon watching what I knew would be a story of one person, virtually alone, in a desperate struggle for life? It’s not like I didn’t know how…

My boyfriend can do almost anything. Forgive the love-besotted hyperbole, but hear me out. He can mend a ceiling, rewire a wall, re-tile a roof, carve a chess-set, play about twelve instruments, build a bench, remodel a house, replace plumbing, landscape a yard, make a perfect fire. He plays baseball, tennis, basketball, ice hockey, soccer,…

Earlier this month, one of the best shows on television aired its final episode. A few friends and I huddled on a sofa to eat hamburgers and watch the series finale of Friday Night Lights—and I won’t lie, I grabbed a few extra napkins to use as tissue, just in case. Before the episode began…

Having written a memoir filled with confessions, I can attest to two things. First, it’s much easier to confess someone else’s sins than one’s own. Second, I’d rather confess my own sins—when I must—to a faceless assembly of readers, rather than a living, gasping person. I most certainly prefer literary confession to looking the person…

As a New Yorker who took up calligraphy in the wake of 9/11, a thought occurred to me one day. What if—in the spirit of “Show, don’t tell”—one found a more refreshing way to establish common ground among Abraham’s oft-estranged offspring of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? What if one were to mount an exhibit in…

Note: This post contains spoilers for the first season of Downton Abbey. Last month, Masterpiece Theater’s newest period drama garnered thousands of besotted fans. Downton Abbey opens with news of Titanic’s tragedy and closes with news that Britain has entered the war in 1914—in between, the show provides an entry into Edwardian upstairs-downstairs intricacies within…