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Category: MBH Essays

  • Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas!

                      Every Christmas at Mill Brook House we bring out our “Christmas movies,” It’s a Wonderful Life and The Shop Around the Corner.  For  some reason we’ve added To Be or Not to Be to the mix, perhaps because, like Shop Around the Corner, it takes place in winter in another Lubitsch-in-Hollywood…

  • Late Autumn

      Late Autumn is the name of a film by Ozu, who often named his films after seasons: Late Spring, Early Spring, Early Summer (despite being best known for Tokyo Story).  Western culture doesn’t usually draw such fine distinctions between the seasons, but country life has sharpened my sensitivity to the differences between the early,…

  • Three Children’s Books

    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…

  • Nellie Fox, the Fierce Shiba Inu

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  • The Children’s Crusade

    Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer In the summer of 1967, I went to Holly Springs, Mississippi with a group of students from Michigan State to conduct a summer workshop for incoming freshman at Rust College, an historic black college, which had lost its accreditation because of low academic standards.  Products of segregated schools, Rust students had…

  • Spielberg’s Lincoln

        Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, when our garden is frozen and we have more time to be in town, we try to catch up with a few movies at the Greenfield Garden Cinema.  This year we caught Spielberg’s Lincoln on the Sunday before Christmas and enjoyed it, especially the acting.  Critics have heaped praise on Daniel…

  • One Year After

    The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Irene came and went, and I tried not to notice.  Grass has grown back, as best it could, given the drought.  The garden is re-established, still lacking many perennials but with improved soil and design; we have added a second garden, especially for daylilies.  We love the broad, mow-able path…

  • Robert John Geist 1912-1985

      On a recent visit to Mill Brook House, my sister asked if I remembered eating in our dinette when we were kids.  From the 1920’s-1940’s dinettes, small alcoves with a built-in table and benches, made smaller more efficient kitchens possible.  Ours was generally packed with no fewer than five people, my mother presiding over…

  • You CAN Get There from Here

       For the first time since we bought the house, we made what used to be our annual trek to Tanglewood.  Armed with eggs (boiled) and cheese from Goat Rising and bread and muffins from the Country Store, we headed southwest to the music camp.  Arriving around 10:30, we found a shady spot for the…

  • MassMoCA

    True confession: I dragged my feet getting to MassMoCA.  After six years in the Berkshires and numerous trips to North Adams, we finally made it there January 1, 2011.  I’d never been a fan of contemporary art, even though this was ostensibly the area of my Ph.D.  But as a medievalist-turned-film-historian, I was much less…