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Forget pumpkin spice
Last year wasn’t kind to our apple farmers and picking enthusiasts due to the crop shortage and nonstop rain, so fingers, ears and eyes crossed that everyone wins this year–and packs on some winter insulation from cider donuts in new york! Here’s a look at some of our favorite places. Please visit their websites or call ahead for hours and varieties of apples. Lakeview Orchard, Lanesborough, MA | Small but charming, in September, visitors can pick apples, peaches, plums, and pears. The store also sells baked goods and, most importantly, pierogies! Small but charming, in September, visitors can pick apples, peaches, plums, and pears. -Louise the Great Hilltop Orchards, Richmond,…
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The Bitter Taste of Fortune: How the Colonial Spice Trade in Salem, Massachusetts, Built the Wealth of a Nation
The water was warm, but still felt cool against Titus’s throat as he gulped from the pigskin flask he’d stashed between the barrels on Turner Wharf. Even at this early hour, the rising humidity of the July day left his skin slick as he packed casks of herring, each weighing 300 pounds when full, at the warehouse, one of dozens clustered along the wharves of the port of Salem, Massachusetts. He glanced up to where Captain Turner was speaking with a customs inspector. One of the city’s wealthiest men, Turner counted among his possessions a beautiful seven-gabled house, a farm, extensive vegetable and flower gardens, fine china and furniture from…
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The Cairns of Periwinkle Cove: Artist James Ayer in Dialogue with Nature—and Beachgoers
Just before six on a late-April morning, sunrise rakes impatient fingers across the sky over the rock-strewn beach of Periwinkle Cove in Rye, New Hampshire. As the sun breaks through the heavy Atlantic cloud cover, it seems to pause, like a glowing punctuation mark, atop an artful stack of eight stones. James Ayer brushes wind-whipped gray hair from his face and stuffs one hand in his jeans pocket. With the other, he gestures to the precariously balanced sculpture, and the dozen or so others around it. “I have a tendency to make something out of things that are just lying around,” he says of an earthworks art-making career that has…
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I Am Going to Leave Her Here: The Rebel Yell of Edith Wharton’s The Mount
The homes of favorite authors are always must-stops on my travel itineraries. But the old adage “Never meet your heroes” might well be applied to writers’ homes, where the reality is usually less than remarkable, running the limited gamut from the spartan and unexceptional to the unkempt, if not derelict. Edith Wharton’s The Mount, the Lenox, Massachusetts, seemed destined to follow the same pattern. My first visit, shortly after I’d moved to the area in 1996, was, to put it politely, underwhelming. Having been benignly neglected and sometimes outright mistreated for half a century, first as a girls’ boarding school and then as the backdrop for theatrical productions, The Mount…
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On the Road to Ruins: A Travel Elegy for Pompeii & Herculaneum
The stone under the backs of my thighs was smooth and hot, like a car seat warmed by the sun. I’d been here for nearly four hours, and, overcome with foot fatigue and the intensity of the Campanian heat, I’d stopped to sit on a raised sidewalk beside the crumbling ruins of tavern. My husband fanned himself with his hat and swigged an entire bottle of water in three long gulps. The streets thronged with people, some walking in pairs or groups, glossy maps held taut between them. Some hauled large backpacks and cameras on tripods. Others pushed strollers. I looked to Mount Vesuvius glowering in the distance, and closed…
Writing the waves of coastal travel
