Zen and the Art of Cross Country Skiing

January 17, 2019.Reading time 9 minutes.

We booked a short getaway at the historic Mount Washington Hotel a couple of days after the new year. There was holiday season stress to shake and a lukewarm agreement to give cross country skiing a try. As a general rule, I am pretty terrible at anything requiring even a hint of athleticism. Even mini-golf […]

Meet The League of Extraordinarily Funny Women

December 12, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

Who didn’t want to be Mary Tyler Moore? Mary was a smart, successful, independent career woman out to conquer the world. That iconic beret toss at the end of the opening sequence also felt like a playful, network friendly way to flip the bird to the typical way women were portrayed on sitcoms—sad singles or […]

The Brattle Book Shop Speaks Volumes

November 8, 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

The Brattle Book Shop is tucked into an innocuous side street that branches off of one of Boston’s busy retail corridors, Downtown Crossing. If you’re not looking for the Brattle, you’re not going to find it unless you randomly turn onto West St. and glance away from your phone long enough to catch the outsized […]

No Peaking

November 2, 2018.Reading time 6 minutes.

This October I missed New England’s main event: peak fall foliage. For people unfamiliar with this phenomenon, each autumn the leaves all over this part of the country go on a hunger strike, leeching the green from their veiny hands to replace it with the most brilliant, jeweled earth tones of scarlets, oranges, and yellows. […]

Rocky: Your Creative Spirit Animal

October 25, 2018.Reading time 9 minutes.

In a creative funk? Rocky can help.

Women Do

October 18, 2018.Reading time 10 minutes.

At first it seems like the three women are just hanging out in the middle of the Commonwealth Ave. mall—a quiet, tree-lined promenade that runs like an artery through the heart of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Lucy Stone appear as life-size bronze statues, posed around large granite blocks. Quotes from […]

Hearts and Seeds

September 28, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

For a long time now I’ve been catching hearts out in the wild. They show up everywhere—in patterns of leaves, in the formation of clouds in the sky, as graffiti on the sides of underpasses. It’s a lot like that Sixth Sense kid, “I see hearts, they’re everywhere!” and sometimes I do whisper in that […]