by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – On paper, the Connecticut River and the Rhone don’t look all that different. Each of them is about three hundred miles long from the town nearest its source (Pittsburg and Chamonix) to its debouchement into the sea (Long Island Sound and the Mediterranean). Their[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – It was always a pleasure, at the beginning formation of Boy Scout meetings, to respond to the command, “Report!” with “All present or accounted for, sir.” Now, over 75 years later, it’s still very satisfactory to count noses in the airline gate area at[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – By the time you read this, I’ll be home from what I hope will have been an idyllic 10 days traveling with friends of New Hampshire Public Broadcasting down the Rhone Valley from Chamonix to Arles. I’m writing it during a serious welter of[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – I spent a couple of weeks in Costa Rica a few years ago. Lovely place. But by the time we were due to return home, I found I could hardly wait to get there. The weather had been lovely, and the bird-watching spectacular. Each[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – It’s often characterized as a British officers’ drinking song, but it’s hardly that. “The Anacreontic Song” was the official song of an 18th-century club of London “wealthy men of social rank” that met monthly for banquets, musical performances, and group singing. Their patron saint,[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – The other day – a bluebird day if ever there was one: temperature in the seventies; bright blue sky, robins on the lawn, coltsfoot rioting along the driveway – I shuffled tentatively across the newly mud-free yard to the barnlike garage where the cars[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – If there were a Shakespearean stage direction for the arch-conservative wing of American politics as it is currently constituted, it would be, “Exeunt stage right, scattering petards.” How in the world any group can expect to prevail consistently among the majority of the electorate[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – American Airlines Flight #6059 to Burlington swung wide over Lake Champlain and approached the airport from the north, delightfully early, explaining without words why we were early: a strong south wind all the way from Philadelphia. A wheelchair was waiting for me halfway up[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – Almost every day I treat myself to the blog of Heather Cox Richardson. I consider it sort of a stroking of my biases, which by this time of my life hardly need affirmation. But I learn stuff, too. In one of this week’s daily[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – Most of us, I daresay, learned the story of Bluebeard as children (though, apparently, it’s too frightening and thus off-limits to some modern children). The wealthy, but grotesque nobleman, before leaving on a trip, gives his new wife the keys to all the rooms[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – The switch from nursing home to personal home went off without a hitch. The multiple family members here to help effect it then left one by one, till I’m down to: Kiki; Herschel my four-wheel, silk-smooth walker; and Hagar, the hybrid SUV parked two[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – January 2023 was a month of Sundays, ending abruptly on the January 29, with a fourth and final Sunday fall on ice underfoot. My friend Bea and I left my house for church that morning, and that was the last time I saw the[Read More…]