The house has good bones. The morning light falls on walls and sills and floorboards, and on the old kitchen stove. Here is the kitchen table where I used to write. There’s the painted chair my friend Malaga rescued from the corner of Broadway and 92nd Street. For 200 years the house has occupied this overgrown hollow. This used to be my home on Cape Cod...
Read More
There was a forest between my grandmother’s house and the cliffs that rose from the sea. Spruce and balsam in equal share, white pine, red pine and a collection of towering hardwoods—single masts of maple and oak sailing along in an ocean of evergreens. For my purposes I needed the firs, the balsam. I’d take myself to the place where they were dominant and...
Read More
In the late 1950s, while American families blew up in size and the seeds of the turbulent ‘60s sprouted and began to grow, my parents went through what I call their Mini-Mammalian Period, a microcosmic span of time reminiscent of the mid-Jurassic. It was characterized by an unbridled proliferation of undersized pets, beginning with the patriarch Templeton....
Read More
The first camera I owned was a pinhole camera. I made it myself at summer camp in New Jersey. It was 1963, the year of a July solar eclipse, and the good people of Camp Red Ram came up with a plan to keep us from looking directly at the sun. We’d spent many days making keychain lanyards and plaster casts of raccoon prints. We learned how to sew our own pup...
Read More
With a well-intended but somewhat unorthodox show of manners, I once picked up a roadkilled pheasant to bring to a friend who invited me to dinner. The bird was still warm. It had a broken wing but no visible trauma to the meaty body. It had clearly been hit by a passing vehicle only moments before. I was headed for the hills, the Knobs of Kentucky, on a...
Read More