I spend twenty minutes wandering around a paved path that loops up over several short grassy hills trying to find “Author’s Ridge,” the plateau where Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau are buried. There is big nineteenth-century nerd energy here in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord Massachusetts. Designed…
I heard the woman yelling before I saw her. I looked up from where I sat in my parked car to see an elderly woman, her shoulders rounded, dressed in a long yellow skirt and white cardigan standing on the sidewalk in front of me. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, the kind women wear…
Wild turkeys are roaming in the neighborhood. My first turkey sighting was on an early winter morning. I was driving home from the gym when I turned into our street and saw a mom with her two young kids standing on the sidewalk. The mom was pointing in the direction of our house just a…
“DO NOT RENT BOX 841!” Someone scrawled the note in black sharpie and tacked it on the wall over a table littered with papers and assorted office supplies. I stared at it while I waited for the post officer worker to reappear. She was retrieving a package that ended up in the main branch of…
At first I mistook the high-pitched keen for the sound of a distant chainsaw. But the woods stretched for at least a half mile to the nearest house. And it was early February with snow on the ground and the kind of bracing cold that locks your lungs in a vice. The only people hearty…
