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Dear Folks: February 26, 2000
Dear Folks,
What a lot can happen in a month! Even a short month like February.
I just looked back at what I wrote to you a month ago:
I was complaining about oil at $1.30 a gallon; now it’s $1.90.
It was 20 below with no snow. Today it’s 60 degrees warmer than that, the huge snowpiles around us are melting, and Ken [...]
Dear Folks: January 22, 2000
Dear Folks,
They say it might get up to +5 degrees today. It was -20 last night and will be again tonight. We’ve gone from one of the warmest Decembers ever to a January that is about to break the all-time record for the number of successive days in which the temperature drops below zero.
There is a lot of wind to [...]
Dear Folks: December 26, 1999
December 26, 1999
Dear Folks,
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” That sentence, which opens Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, always makes me cry, because of its past tense. Had a farm in Africa. The whole book is a hymn of sorrow for that lost farm.
Even when I still owned Foundation Farm and thought I [...]
Dear Folks: November 21, 1999
Dear Folks,
I wondered last month whether I’d be writing this month from my old house or my new one. Well, the answer is neither. I’m in my office at Dartmouth, because things are chaotic at home — home still being Foundation Farm for another week. Actually my office there is still functional, except that I’m beginning to pack up books [...]
Dear Folks: October 24, 1999
Dear Folks,
It’s a brisk Sunday morning, 40 degrees, half-cloudy. The sun, just lifting over the eastern hill, is turning Mount Ascutney brilliant red. As I look out my window (probably the last time I will be looking out this window as I write this newsletter), the land is revealing itself again, as the leaves stream down and the long views [...]
