Farming is not easy. Crops are dependent on the weather, and you never know when you might get wiped out by too much rain or drought. If you farm organically, like we do, your crops are vulnerable to invasive species like the gypsy moths that mowed down four rows of our blueberries a few …
Category Archives: Memoir
CRASH
It was too much to ask, this tantalizing trauma on familiar ground. It was an unusual event, people spiraling to their death at 250 miles an hour. I had to know what the earth looked like. What had changed? Was it crushed? Were trees twisted, and bent to the ground? Or, was there a …
THE MEASURE OF DOGS
I don’t know what it is about dogs and why we love them so fiercely, or why we can’t go about our lives without them. I know that I can’t seem to find my compass without a dog in my life. My dog companions enable me to map the territory of the heart, and when …
DECADE LATE, SAND DOLLAR SHORT
Donna Dufresne It’s been years since I’ve been to the beaches in Southern Maine. Perhaps even decades, and more than half a century since I peddled sand in a bucket as a child. We rarely went to the beach when I was growing up in the fifties & sixties. My mother didn’t drive, and my …
WHEN THE APPLE FALLS FROM THE TREE OF RACISM
I’ve never been one for the Old Testament. The stories creeped me out as a child and filled my head with the images of murderous brothers, frightful storms and zombie-like lepers roaming the desert. The feminist side of me certainly had issues with the story of Adam and Eve and those literalists who believe that …
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BIRTH MARKED
Donna Dufresne A few years back, my ninety-one-year-old father made one of those odd confessions that come with old age when the brain wanders around in the tangled past, grasping at threads. I had just told him that I had sent in my DNA test to find out about our heritage. I joked that …
GYPSIES AND THE ART OF BEING AN OUTSIDER
Donna Dufresne I have had a life-long obsession with the Romani people (Roma), commonly known as “Gypsies”. It may have started in my childhood, when my mother told me stories about how the Gypsies would come into town every summer when she was a child and set up camp down by the Charles River. There …