Posts by Mary Hall

This year is not a leap year, so February has its signature twenty eight days. Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere often consider this the final month of winter, though climate change may cause reconsideration of this at some point. Often the subject of love comes up, most certainly on account of Valentines Day…

This morning I read an interesting Bloomberg article entitled “Twelve Rules for Life” by Megan McArdle. I was surprised to see it because these sorts of articles and lists usually appear in January as folks are composing their New Years Resolutions, even if they don’t get past number one, and even if that one exists…

My writing teacher loved you. Well, especially: “M&M faced ragsters jumbling pell-mell into a faded pink station wagon at dawn.” A morning of summer blueberry picking was what it was all about. Donning belts to hold buckets to hold berries freshly plucked from their limbs. Later, somewhere in the field, a radio blared Diana Ross…

Rafters loom large between rusty nails. A small raccoon peers out diamond at roof’s gable. Ladder, missing rungs of course, stands ready. Pine wood, walnut casings, large barrel stuffed with radio parts, Mr. Bowles, struck dead by a mail truck on Henry Street, left treasures up there. Sleepovers, flashlights, sleeping bags, pillows, Tiger Beat magazine.…

Is there ever a good mourning? Recently my mother passed away followed the next month by my mother-in-law. Two very different, loving women whose nine decades were filled to the brim with what mattered most to each of them, and family was right up there. The Covid19 pandemic altered the way in which we were…

A thick, deliciously dense and ferny woods beckoned behind our house when I was young. This other world presented itself next to a small white church, obscured behind a few modest homes in our gritty working class neighborhood. Beechnut, pine, ferns, moss, and decaying wood all sent up a heady amalgam of musty scents easily…

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about a poem written over one hundred years ago by the poet T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  Written in 1910, the poem was immediately cast into a new category of poetry called modernism, “a literary movement at the turn of the 20th century that emphasized…

I have a preference for poetry and short stories over novels and non-fiction.  I read a story a day, and maybe a few poems when I have time. Certainly reading and writing take up the bulk of my days now.  Winter is coming and I know that this will be even more true as the…

Three of us stood under trees at the end of a long crumbling asphalt driveway joking and talking about the upcoming election. To our right, a large culvert, filled with water from recent rains punctuated the bottom of green grassy slopes leading upward on either side to distant houses that couldn’t have been more different.…

In the 80’s a fellow teacher and I put together a multi-disciplinary unit based on Hot Zone, a book by Richard Preston written about an Ebola outbreak. In this true story, monkeys imported from Asia to Reston, Virginia for research purposes were suddenly getting sick. Originally, the monkey handler didn’t know what was going on…