There must be a Norwegian proverb predicting luck or misfortune for anyone caught in a flooding event in New York City and thereby missing their plane to Oslo. My father drove and swore as the station wagon kicked up plumes of rainwater along the highway-turned-river. If it was misfortune that the plane had departed when we finally arrived at Kennedy...
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I went to school from first grade through ninth in a tall building beside a river. Tugboats went up and down the river and one unforgettable afternoon my best friend Sue Sanders screamed and pointed and we ran to where she stood by the window. There before us, so large it seemed like it might get stuck between the banks of the river, was a submarine. It...
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A note from the writer: This piece first ran in these pages in October 2020. My desire to run it again follows a conversation with my friend, Lynne, who wondered why we were seeing so little in print about the ordinary and contributing lives of the people we are presently deporting. Citizenship and legal status can be a very long road, and those who are on...
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At the first sign of spring in my neighborhood, from the top of the street to the bottom, out come the boats. They sit on trailers or atop Subarus and SUVs. They lean against fences and languish in driveways. The street itself becomes an asphalt river, a runway for a beauty contest of boats. Brad, up the hill, is heading to the San Juan with a load of new...
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Ever since we discovered the existence of dinosaurs, there’s been a subset of the population, and not just children, whose fascination with them and admiration for them should have warned us, decades ago, of the particular future we find ourselves in now. Brawn is a word not often used in the new vocabulary of our time, yet it is more and more at the root...
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