Articles About Personal History :: Page 2

• BLOG— Hello, season of good-bye

  By Audrey HackettSeptember 13, 2016

  

  Fall is slightly seedy, a tad disreputable. There’s that whiff of decay, of course, and the distinct and accurate sense that things are coming apart at the seams. Fall is a thrift-store velvet jacket, wine-stained purple, with your elbows showing through.

• BLOG— In sorrow and in joy

  By Audrey HackettAugust 23, 2016

  

  They got married in a garden bordering an old-growth forest. I love the symbolism of that. Their lives are theirs to cultivate, and I have no doubt they will grow a good garden together.

• BLOG— Of fireflies, stars and time

  By Audrey HackettJuly 12, 2016

  

  I could stay out here all night, looking at the white stars, the golden fireflies, the dark shadows against the dark house. Everything I see prompts the question, Are you seeing this, are you really seeing this? I want to see; it feels like knowing, which feels like living.

• BLOG— Remembering Long Pond

  By Audrey HackettJune 14, 2016

  

  Long Pond was a lake, despite its name. It hung like a particularly wet piece of laundry on the line that was Moose River. The river fed the lake, and the lake, nine miles later, fed the river. Long Pond was a pause in the river’s flow — the river putting up its feet and taking a break.

• BLOG— In summer’s country

  By Audrey HackettMay 31, 2016

  

  And that’s how childhood seems to me, a place more than a time. I still dream about certain things: the creek, the cherry tree in the backyard, the concrete front stoop that was a clean, if somewhat bumpy, slate for drawing.

• BLOG— ‘A very, very fine house’

  By Audrey HackettMay 24, 2016

  

  Like a lifetime achievement award, Yellow Springs bestows the moniker of home ownership at the end of a person’s career, not at its beginning or mid-point. And why not? A person doesn’t own a thing just because a piece of paper says she does.

• BLOG— A prayer for days

  By Audrey HackettMay 17, 2016

  

  The day begins with tree shadow, with bird song, with a rectangle of grey on the slanted ceiling that slowly warms to blue. The top of a spruce floats there, and the ghost of the crabapple cut down this spring.

• BLOG— Surveying the irises

  By Audrey HackettMay 3, 2016

  

  It’s iris season again. Three years ago, I could have told you exactly where the village’s best and showiest blooms grew. Here, a look back at that 2013 “iris survey.”

• BLOG— Noticing 101

  By Audrey HackettApril 5, 2016

  

  My favorite glimpse was a blaze of forsythia growing up between two dark-clad Norway spruces. The spruces have always reminded me of a certain kind of minister or undertaker, while the yolky yellow interlude was like a kid’s laughter in a stern church.

• BLOG— It’s my birthday! (Shhh…)

  By Audrey HackettMarch 8, 2016

  

  Somehow “it’s her birthday” will be stamped on my forehead, or written in the sky with a big sky-arrow pointing down. Does this border on a sort of pleasant paranoia, a birthday persecution complex? It might.