Category: History
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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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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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We spent most of Saturday, June 20, celebrating Charlemont’s 250th birthday. State Representative Paul Mark and Senator Benjamin Downing presented the Town with a framed facsimile of its original charter, which the two men had paid to have restored. Five towns in Downing’s district had 250th birthdays this weekend, so the senator was busy. I…
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We watched Woman in Gold with about four other people last Sunday at the Greenfield Garden Cinema’s noon screening. It tells the story of Maria Altmann’s recovery of five Klimt paintings, including the iconic “Woman in Gold,” a portrait of her aunt, which were stolen from her family by the Nazis. Maria’s story, at least as…
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With 2013 so rife with docudramas that NPR’s Robert Siegel felt the need to fact-check them, we managed to see two more over the Christmas holidays, films in which the protagonists attempt to heal relationships long severed by time and space: Saving Mr. Banks at the Greenfield Garden Cinema and Philomena at Images, a small…
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My husband insists that Mill Brook House has returned me to my agrarian roots. I insist I don’t really have agrarian roots, but compared to growing up in a Brooklyn housing project…yes, okay. I grew up on the edge of the Michigan State University campus, an agrarian college, in the early 1950’s. Our neighborhood had…
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Not being either a school teacher, mother or grandmother, my familiarity with children’s books written after the 1960’s is sketchy at best, although I did read the entire Harry Potter series. I was inspired to do a little catching up when author Sheila O’Connor stayed with us this past summer, and, later in the summer, The…
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