When the armies of Napoleon swept over Europe, one of the generals made a surprise attack on the little town of Feldkirch, on the Austrian border. As Napoleon’s formidable army maneuvered on the mountains above the city, a council of its citizens was hastily summoned to decide whether to surrender or attempt a defense. In […]

April Fool’s I don’t mean the joking or pranking kind because that will be over with by the time you’re reading this, that holiday will have passed, all the brilliant gags sprung, all the dumb pranks…pranked. Rather the April fool’s that makes you think Spring is here, that it has arrived, Old Man Winter is […]

  Chimney Swifts are one of my favorite birds and I eagerly await their return each year in the spring. I love their chattery calls and that is most often how I am alerted to their presence. When I was first learning about birds, they were described to me as a cigar with wings. They […]

Spring and Gardening in the Air Greetings from the island everyone. As I sit here at my little kitchen table the morning of the second week of March, I am happy to know that Spring is only a few weeks away. But as I speak, Mother Nature is on the verge of reminding me that […]

It’s hard to say what the future holds… If we could, we’d all be happier or so we tell ourselves, we’d all be in the right place at the right time: The right job, the right relationship, the right area. If we could see the future we could see the best and worst choices we […]