Last week, Joseph Shabalala, Founder and Choral Director of the iconic South African musical group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, died at the age of 78. At the direction of South Africa’s President Cyril Rhamaposa, Shabalala will be buried on February 22 in a Special Official Funeral...
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I have written elsewhere about the regal Grande Dame Oak Tree that towers over our home. Her beauty, serenity and patience as she stands rooted in place. Her sense of humor as she teases us, using our roof for seasonal target practice, honing her acorn...
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The hallway is filled with photographs of the departed. Not only the dead, but those who, for reasons too numerous and complex to enumerate, have drifted away in the currents of time. Even those who are still living are no longer the people portrayed in the...
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Yesterday was planting day, the day allium and tulip bulbs of various hue and shape find their places in my garden. In preparation, my wife and I pore over on-line catalogues, ordering bulbs that complement what I harvested from my flower beds and stored for...
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Visitors to Boston walk the Freedom Trail, visit the Old North Church and our gilded State House, but we who live here are often the last to visit the treasures of our history. Included among them is The Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library,...
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It is midday. Mid-September. An in-between season. Time has paused. We are at that indefinable point when all the air has been exhaled, but the next inhalation has not yet begun...
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The huge oak tree towering over our house has a wonderful sense of humor. When she feels we are insufficiently grateful for her shade, she waves her many slender arms and showers her multiple-lobed leaves down on us. I hear her wheezy laughter soughing in...
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My mother and I entered the little room at the bank, her safety deposit box in hand. It was time to catalogue the contents, which no one had looked at for several decades. I helped her open the box and then stood back. This is...
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By November, if all goes well, my wife and I will have gone from no grandchildren to five in under a minute. Well, not quite, but that’s what it feels like. My parents have been married long enough to have children in their seventies, my mother...
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I was the lucky one. I got the bare mattress in an open-air screened porch. It was the end of August in upstate New York, one of the Finger Lakes just across the road. The brisk lake breeze cooling the room in the black of...
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We think the past behind us, and the future ahead. That errors and misjudgments in the rearview mirror are over, and possibilities to come are visible only through the front windshield....
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