-
Mirror on the Wall
It was a tiny room in the middle of the vast museum. An intimate space. We had already paid obeisance to the Neapolitan Christmas Tree, the eighteenth-century confection that materializes each year in the courtyard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had admired the intricate architecture of huts and sheepfolds leading up to the…
-
The Roaring Twenties
Put yourself on a New York City streetcorner on a summer afternoon in 1929. You can imagine it, sure, but can you really hear it? No? Now you can. Emma Thompson, a MacArthur-winning professor of history at Princeton University, has constructed a digital time machine that allows you to experience the jack hammers, fog horns…
-
Knitting and Giving
Here is a Christmas tale involving soft wool, magic sticks and a sense of loving duty. A missionary working in Shichigahama, Japan, a place devasated by the tsunami in March 2011, instigated an outreach program called Yarn Alive that brought thousands of skeins of donated wool and a little knitting instruction to the people of the…
-
Tra La La La La (La La La La)
I breezed through the local shopping mall yesterday on my knee scooter, only mildly terrifying the people directly in my path. I felt good. I had completed all my shopping days before. There would be nothing to buy in the future. And the Christmas tunes swelled loud and corny and hypnotic all around. Peter Zimmerman…
-
From the Chimney With Care
They’re waiting. Waiting in plain sight, hung from the chimney with care, assembled of felt and yarn and sparkles. Everyone in the house for the holidays is an adult now, but still we hang our stockings. The practice of hanging a Christmas stocking… why hang a sock to collect treats, or put out a shoe…
-
A Grimm Tale
Recently I checked out my reader reviews for The Orphanmaster – not always a good thing for a writer to do, but Amazon makes it so easy – and after the wonderful, wonderful, wonderfuls I was stopped short by this extremely erudite criticism: Yick. One of my readers actually had to put the book down…
-
Desert Desperados
My favorite blogger-in-arms Peter Zimmerman is tall, lean, sun-loving and more than occasionally prickly. So I knew that when he wanted to write about the saguaro there would be no better perspective on the cactus. Hard to believe [he writes] that it’s been 43 years since I saw my first saguaro. I was twelve years old…
-
Ever Abustle
What exactly was the Victorian bustle, and why did it become a fashion staple? In Savage Girl, the main character follows a trajectory of fashion changes, from a threadbare shift to simple girlish day dresses to glamorous evening wear, including what is generally thought to be the ball gown of the century. She is not…
-
The Calico War
A dispatch from guest post-er Peter Zimmerman. In the 1840s, a band of Calico Indians wrought havoc in Delaware County and probably enjoyed doing so. They were based in the sleepy hamlet of Bovina Center, New York, where I lived last summer for a spell, as well the neighboring communities of Roxbury, Andes, and Kortright.…
-
Bit by Bit
Stitch after stitch. The easiest in knitting is the knit stitch, worked over and over, row after row, dignified by its pattern name the garter stitch. Time honored and simple, it’s the foundation of sweaters and scarves all around the world. I man the couch (woman the couch?), man up (woman up?) to knit stitch…
-
A Dollop of Trollope
During a single month in the fall of 1831, a 52-year-old woman named Frances Milton Trollope—Fanny—labored feverishly over a book in a rotting Middlesex farmhouse. She cherished the hope her work would somehow extract her and her family from the grip of poverty. She had no experience as an author. Nothing in her past gave…
-
Gil’s Prize-Winning Apple Crumb Pie
-
To the Lighthouse
Recently I visited the Saugerties Lighthouse, a time-worn red brick structure that has stood just off the shore of the Hudson at the mouth of Esopus Creek since 1869. It replaced the original fire-decimated one built in 1835 — engraved by William Wade, who produced a remarkable picture of the length of the Hudson from…
-
Of Hand Muffs and Weather Masks
Wenceslas Hollar, the finest etcher and printmaker of the seventeenth century, had a thing about fur hand muffs. He had nearly 3,000 prints to his credit, having fled war-torn central Europe for England in 1636 under the patronage of the Earl of Arundel. The extremely fashionable London lady in Hollar’s “Winter” Dress from 1643-44, in…
-
Some Odd Fellows