It’s my pleasure to introduce you to a new Magpie Learner guest blogger, Joshua Singh. I have been Joshua’s academic mentor since January. He enjoys playing hockey and soccer, the 11th Dr. Who and Spiderman. Recently we discovered that we were both heading to New York City this spring. Of course, Joshua saw a very …
Reading, photos – what could be better?
It’s hard to remember now when crowded streets brought joy rather than anxiety.
Thanks goodness for photos and blog posts.
Seven years ago, my friend Angela and I headed out on a warm Easter Sunday afternoon to mingle with other Easter bonnet revelers on 5th Avenue, to see and be seen. Here’s my record of that experience, with wishes for the return of the Easter parade and a happy Easter to those of you who observe it.
New York City’s Easter Parade down 5th Avenue is more than a hundred years old. It has evolved from its late 19th century elegance to its current incarnation – a 10-block promenade where the cute and the zany, the heartwarming and the gawdy, the innovative and the traditional compete for the attention of onlookers, photographers, and other participants. It is five hours of smiling, good-natured fun that needs only a few lyrics from Irving Berlin to accompany it and no further commentary from me.
In your Easter bonnet
With all the frills upon it
You’ll be the grandest lady
In the Easter parade
I’ll be all in clover
‘Cause when they look you over
I’ll be the proudest fella
In the Easter parade
On the Avenue
Fifth Avenue
The photographers will snap us
And you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure
Oh, I could write a sonnet
About your Easter bonnet
And of the girl I’m taking
To the Easter parade!
I climb onto the Middlebury College van for the third consecutive afternoon, grateful for a few hours in the town of Middlebury itself, away from the pretentious Vermont writing conference I’ve paid too much money to audit. And for the third day in a row, the same blonde woman with the open face and relaxed …
This is what literature offers: a language powerful enough to say how it is. (Jeannette Winterson) If you’ve ever helped someone learn – a co-worker in the next cubicle, a grandchild in your kitchen, the neighbor kid across the fence – you’re familiar with the wonderous “Oh, now I see!” moment. When that light appears, …
Yesterday, it was finally warm enough again for me to walk to work. Could spring finally be here, she said, with tremulous hope? And then this morning, I ran across this joyous Steve McCurry tribute to walking. Please enjoy the images and words. Better still, get out and go for a walk yourself!
That’s one good story, that one. (Thomas King, from his work of the same name) It began with five students who sat on the floor outside my classroom every morning, waiting for me to unlock the door. George*, a storyteller in his forties with a cigarette-roughened laugh, was usually entertaining Cheyenne and Melissa, who giggled …
This is the third post by guest blogger Christie Robertson, in which she explores some of the questions of pre-motherhood through a dog ownership lens. Enjoy! I remember it vividly. I was in the truck, with Molly in the back seat barking madly right in my ear. I whipped around and yelled wildly, on the …
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort (J.R. …
Originally posted on Invisible Horse:
This time of year is the hardest, when the skies hardly ever seem to be anything but grey, and the drab dullness of wet woods and sodden fields is only occasionally lifted into life by the sudden brief appearance of the sun. I’d been yearning for colour so badly that…
Wise Woman Travel 