Category: Family
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My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is…
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World War II left millions of children wounded, homeless, hungry, impoverished and often orphaned in defeated and victorious countries alike, as the V-mail below attests. In the United States, the kids were, for the most part, all right, although the stress and dislocation of the war years left some homeless, as a youthful Maya Angelou…
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Kathe and Steve at home with Rocky, Pepper and over a dozen home-grown pumpkins! Mill Brook House, vacation spot and part-time rental, is now our permanent home! Nellie Fox, the fierce shiba inu, is no longer with us and neither is lovable Sandy, champion mouser, whom we acquired soon after Nellie’s passing. Rocky, once half…
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Max was like a delicate flower that faded too soon. He had a water fetish and loved to drink from a running tap, from an unguarded cup or glass or even a watering can; he tracked kitty litter into the bathtub as he examined the droplets that gathered around the drain. A mischief-maker, he chewed…
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Gertrude Erlich was born in Rotterdam, New York, not long after her father, Sam Erlich, had immigrated from Poland, possibly at the behest of his sister Betsy and her husband Jake Coplon. The Coplons settled in Schenectady in upstate New York, where they opened a successful children’s clothing store. Sam, who immigrated with his second…
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Green Depression Glass (photograph: Steven Sternbach) I first encountered the fashion for “vintage Pyrex” a decade ago when I discovered that the mother of a Japanese student I was tutoring shopped for it regularly in antique and second hand stores,…
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Steven Sternbach, Holland Dell, Heath, MA* One of our most memorable Thanksgiving dinners took place over a decade ago in New York’s Essex Hotel on Central Park South, where we were guests of our Manhattan relatives. But through the decades “Over the River and Through the Woods” has conditioned most of us to think of a country…
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In 2002, my father-in-law passed away after a short illness, leaving us the money with which we purchased Mill Brook House. None of our parents ever saw the house, but it’s no stretch to connect Abe to it. Without him, our life in Charlemont would not exist. This is his centennial year. Abe was the…
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In a recent Christian Science Monitor Home Forum essay, Robert Klose recalled the joys and utility of wooden screen doors, which slammed happily all summer long, announcing arrivals and departures. I, too, remember the wooden screen doors of my childhood. There were several on my grandma’s cottage and one on our back door at home…
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Painting by Ammi Phillips, c. 1820 In 1956 my father drove our comparatively new Ford from Michigan to Phoenicia, New York, a town in the Catskills known today for skiing and tubing, to retrieve furnishings stored in the attic of Grace Longyear, my mother’s first cousin once removed. Among these were a delicately painted knock-off…
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