All Dear Folks letters are licensed under a Creative Commons License. DMI encourages you to share this content by following these easy steps.
Dear Folks: April 21, 1991
Dear Folks, It’s a gray Sunday morning, pouring rain onto fields of new grass that are almost blindingly green. The countryside is in its green-brown stage; the upper stories are still unleafed, but the ground is pushing up succulent biomass so fast that it satisfies even the hungry mouths of the lactating ewes and their lambs. In the front yard the [...]
Dear Folks: March 28, 1991
Dear Folks, 7 PM, IT’S A BOY!
The first lamb of 1991 was born half an hour ago, on Good Friday evening, just at dinnertime, on a sweet, mild night that is supposed to turn to a howling snowstorm by morning. By then the lamb will be dry and warm.
It’s exactly 150 days since we turned Ferdinand the ram in with the ewes [...]
Dear Folks: February 24, 1991
Dear Folks, It’s a gray Sunday morning, six degrees outside, the ground war has started half a world away, and they’re not telling us anything about it. I am awed by the momentum of war. Once the people who love war are handed control, once they have made their plans, there seems to be nothing that will stop the unfolding of [...]
Dear Folks: January 20, 1991
Dear Folks, It’s Sunday morning. As I’ve done every other morning this week, I turned on the radio the minute I woke up and cursed at the state of the world. Today an archeologist is talking about the endangered ancient sites in Iraq, and people are praising the Israelis for staying out of the war, and the first Purple Heart has [...]
Dear Folks: December 23, 1990
Dear Folks, It’s two days before Christmas, it’s fifty degrees, it’s drizzling, the grass is green, and I’m depressed. I know that one can’t really ask for “normal” weather in variable New England, but this is ridiculous.
A week ago I thought the greenhouse curse had finally been lifted from us. It snowed all Sunday, a luxuriant, beneficent snow of the sort [...]
