Of all the farms I worked on as a boy, the most memorable was the old Borden Farm, which was on the east side of Canadarago Lake outside of Richfield Springs.…
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life sketches
My son Jonathan called me the other night to tell me that he missed the old house in Brooklyn. He had lived there his whole life as I did mine—except for the Army, and my longest winter in Richfield Springs. I told him that I missed the house, too, and described my last days there.…
The portraits were the size of baseball cards. I recognized one of the names, Stanley Musial, a great outfielder who, in his heyday, had been known as “Stan the Man.”…
One frog was foolish enough to hop under the enclosure and was immediately set upon by Rosie, one of my golden comets that looks more like a Rhode Island red than the rest...…
In Richfield, on top of being confined, snowy weeks would go by without the sun shining. It didn’t take long for the ache of loneliness to get to me and sometimes I’d find ways to get out of the house to visit a friend, even if I had to climb out my second floor bedroom window.…
On the Christmas of her tenth year, I went to Sears and bought Elizabeth a full size, 26-inch, candy-apple red touring bike and stood it under the tree. As a family, we had already done a lot of riding and I thought she’d be delighted to get a full-size bike like Alice’s.…
Max didn’t see her again until his Easter break from school. The child had come, but its father had not shown up. One night they went for a drive while Winkie’s sister watched the baby. It was unusually warm for that time of year. Max turned off the blacktop and followed a stone road down to the lake. He shut the engine and they just sat there, not talking.…
Back in the coop, I lifted the outside door to the laying box and was about to reach in when I noticed that there was something in there, apparently sitting on the eggs. A chicken, I thought. I bent to look inside and came face to face with a raccoon.…
My earliest memories of The Pavilion are when I was about 5 years old and my dad rented a rowboat there. At the time, I was impressed with the lake’s dam and the giant towers that supported the power lines with their huge ceramic insulators.…
Lady Ostapeck, whose birth name was Alma Kaukinen, was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother died a few days after she gave birth and her father, an immigrant from Finland, left the newborn child in the care of her mother’s sister.…
