Years ago, my three siblings and I discovered that we shared a recurring nightmare: We are running for our lives down our childhood street in Brooklyn, being chased by a subway train broken…

Because, as the crow flies, I’m only a few flaps and caws from the Connecticut River, I wake up most autumn mornings to a river fog dreamscape. All the air is suffused with soft gray, as…

The summer I was 23, I lived in a treehouse in the Maine woods. My boyfriend, Curry, and I had just returned to the state after an unsuccessful attempt to start careers in Colorado, near my…

The cook cabin sat in the middle of the campground, its front porch looking directly out across Kidney Pond and into the southern part of Baxter State Park. It fit perfectly between the old…

I think of winter’s passing not as time, but as firewood. As the weeks progress, the woodpile shrinks; every day’s fire spends a little more of what I set aside through summer. I…

When our children were small, my husband began mowing paths through our field, grassy lanes that allowed little legs to maneuver more easily through the landscape of home. Although those small…

It was August in northern New York, and the leaves still shone an optimistic green. But Labor Day was closing in, and my wife Lisa and I would soon join millions of other parents as empty…

Every year just after Memorial Day, when the blackflies are at their cruelest, I take a Maine fishing trip with my brother Jake, his twin daughters, my two sons, and one of my daughters.…

On my family’s 80-acre Christmas tree farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom was a large swamp populated by northern white cedar trees. The swamp was at the base of Mount Monadnock,…