By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
Growing up on a farm near Yamhill, Ore., I quickly learned to appreciate the difference between fresh, home-grown foods and the commercial versions in the supermarket.
Store-bought lettuce was always lush, green and pristine, and thus vastly preferable to lettuce from my Mom’s vegetable garden (organic before we called it… »

UP-AND-COMER POETRY
Small Saturday Poem and Waking Me
By Chris Shafer

POETRY
Katrina’s Voices
By Jenny Root

POETRY
Miss Lizzie’s Kitchen
By Eve… »

By D. CAMERON LAWRENCE

Growing up in southern New England in the 1960s and ’70s—pre-sprawl—I had what many children today do not have: a birthright of outdoor adventure. We opened our doors to a huge, undivided landscape of green fields, tumbling brooks, hummocked marshes and quiet woods. My little brother and I roamed the outdoors like… »

A question about the town motto sparks an organization, beautification and community involvement
By SUSAN WILLIAMSON

A little over four years ago, my husband and I found our retirement nest: 10 acres with a creek, pastures and blueberry bushes in Rural Hall, North Carolina. After settling in, we noticed that the local welcome signs proclaimed Rural Hall… »

Novel portrays one woman’s struggle to overcome lost youth
By MARY POPHAM

Early in her new novel, At the Breakers, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall mentions two classics, Persuasion and Middlemarch. These titles foreshadow that her subject will mainly delineate women’s roles and their relationships to others: mothers and daughters, friends and lovers, co-workers and employers. Examining from many… »

Poems speak to loss with grace, acceptance
By LAUREL ANN BOGEN

Carine Topal’s collection of poems, In the Heaven of Never Before, is a heaven rich in imagery. From the opening poem, appropriately titled “From This,” where she writes
I come. From kraut, potato field, radish and iris bulbs,/burrowed from the tundra; from china cups and money/bags left… »

By MICHELE NIESEN

The azaleas won’t flower. I pruned them below the new growth. I think you said above. The forsythia bloomed way too early, but I haven’t killed them yet. I got exactly five tomatoes this season and they were pretty good, I guess. I can’t remember if you told me to mulch the rhododendrons… »

FROM THE EDITOR
Buy, buy, buy.
Being frugal, and especially in these tough economic times, those are precisely the words I don’t want to hear.
So the day my husband David came up with a plan to construct a much-needed hay shelter out of recycled materials, I was game. In his construction job, he’d torn down a customer’s… »

By G.C. COMPTON

“Alice Rose, Alice Rose, wears her daddy’s shoes and her mommy’s clothes!”
Sung to the tune of a jump-rope song, the words came high-pitched and mocking across the Little Peabrook schoolyard. Again and again they rose, over the clatter of the seesaw and the merry-go-round, above the shrieking swing chains.
And one by one… »

By WILLIAM R. WOODARD

Vengeful teenagers dyed my golden retriever pink to get even with me for kicking them off Jericho Island. I was shaving Penny’s once-platinum locks to the skin when Kera called.
“Gus,” she said, “I know what happened. Is Penny okay?”
“She’s fluorescent pink,” I said. “How’d you find out so soon?”
“The kids posted a… »