“When everything else has gone from my brain,” writes Annie Dillard in the preface to her memoir, An American Childhood; “When everything else has gone from my brain,” what will be left, I believe is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way or that.” Dillard is talking about Pittsburgh, a [...]
“My life flows on in endless song
above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the real though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing.
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?”
The preceding lyrics are from one of my favorite hymns: #108, “My Life Flows On [...]
My husband David grew up in Chester, Massachusetts, a small, out-of-the-way, non-descript hill town in the Berkshires. His city-reared parents had bought the Chester Inn, smack in the center of the village, and ran it as a Boarding House/ Bar that came to be inhabited and frequented by a quirky cast of characters straight [...]
This is a tale of two tattoos — a parable of regret and redemption.
There was a man who had been a devout Jew. As a boy and young man, he had joyfully worshipped his God in the village shul, and he kept all of God’s commandments and laws.
But when he entered his twenties, the man [...]