2026: Sunday May 17: Cat in a box.

That's it, a cat in a box. She's yawning, but it is always funny when you catch a yawning cat, because they look like they're screaming mad.

"Love Your Baby"

2026: Saturday May 9: Research Purposes Only

I have never smoked a cigar in my life and since I'm writing about cigar makers, that seems like it could be a problem. So when I learned that the Broome County Historian, Roger Luther, was giving a talk at the Lost Dog Cafe on the history of cigars in Binghamton, and that there would be a cigar lounge in the tent out back afterwards, well, I had to go, right? 

The Lost Dog Cafe is a Binghamton institution housed in the Hull Grummond building, which was built in 1886 as a cigar factory and employed 600 people in its heyday. Michael and I used to be such regulars there that one Christmas our server gave us the gift certificate they'd been given by management to give to a customer (I'm sorry about that sentence). But we don't go out to dinner much any more, so it has been a while. 

Roger Luther told me when I chatted to him afterwards that his primary research passion is the New York State Inebriate Asylum, a massive gothic pile overlooking the river on the east edge of town, but he put together an exhibition of cigar workers for Women's History month earlier this year, and last night's talk emerged out of that. He said only a few things that I didn't already know, but it was all fascinating, and I enjoyed how much the audience was into it and I was intrigued by their questions about things that I've taken for granted ever since I first started researching women's work during my college thesis on the Dunedin Tailoresses Union. For example someone asked why were women doing the low pay work. And I'm thinking, uh, because of the long history of devaluing women's labor, both economically and socially, that leads to women being deliberately excluded from skilled crafts?

Anyway. I asked my writing group if any of them wanted to go, since they've read some of my chapters, and Ethan and Rhonda and Rhonda's husband Jonathan all came along and we bought one cigar and smoked half of it together and I asked the cigar dudes how to properly smoke it and because they are cigar dudes they were so happy to explain stuff to a lady, and like a lot of people who are into a thing, they were thrilled that someone else was about to start on a journey of exploration. Except I'm not going on a journey, I'm getting off the train after one stop. One quarter of one half of a cigar with a mild Connecticut wrapper was enough for me. My mouth still tastes ashy and burnt even though I've brushed my teeth several times and the cats keep sniffing my hair like I smell wrong. But the whole thing was a blast and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. 

Me trying to look like I know what I'm doing. Jonathan took the photo. He is a professional photographer and his original framing tells a better story, but I cropped it to take out the faces of people in the background. Perhaps I will pay Jonathan so I can use this as my eventual author photo. 

Here's a link to one of Roger Luther's pieces on the State Hospital. He's still researching the place, and has given updated talks as recently as last year, but these photos from his 2014 post are particularly fascinating. http://nyslandmarks.com/treasures/14feb.htm

And here is a post Roger Luther wrote in 2012 about the Hull Grummond building.  http://nyslandmarks.com/treasures/12jul.htm

2026: May 3: New Haven

Just got back from another weekend in New Haven, visiting Ella and seeing her last show of the school year, for which she was an Assistant Technical Director. 

Technical direction involves implementing the designer's vision safely and effectively. It is technical, yes, but also collaborative and creative in its own right. She gave us a tour of the set - here she is showing me some of the magic she performs in the service of art. 

More showing me stuff. Ella was responsible for this wall and there is more going on behind there than I ever imagined. I don't know how anything works, so it is all fascinating and impressive.

Yale is obscenely rich, and full of wonderful creative interesting things. On this trip we went to the Yale University Art Gallery, which is free, and you can just wander in off the street and randomly pick a floor and discover they have a stunning collection of modern art from the early twentieth century, mostly donated by artist, patron, and collector Katherine Dreier, who I'd never heard of, who seems to have been incredibly important, and about who I am intrigued. I now want my next novel (hah!)  to be some weird mixture of circus people, social reformers, and artists living in New York in 1911. I have no idea how I will pull it off, especially since I know next to nothing about the circus or art and still haven't actually figured out how to write a first book.

Ella and Michael discuss two Kandinskys, casual Mondrian in the background.

Please enjoy this close-up of Ella's Red Wing boots, with the steel caps showing through. She does have other, newer, boots, don't worry, but I think these are molded to her feet and make them feel like they're wrapped in a security blanket. The server at dinner on Friday night even commented on the legitimacy of her footwear, noting that they weren't boots for show. 

2026: April 26: Chainsaw season

It happens every year. The weather warms, the birds start singing, the daffodils bloom, and the big trucks loaded with power tools pull up all over the neighborhood. On Friday I was working at the kitchen table downstairs when I heard chainsaws start up in the yard behind us. Not exactly conducive to my creative process, that sound. Then two behemoths backed into the driveway of the people across the road in front of us. My physical reaction is testament to the traumatic effect of losing heritage tree after heritage tree all along our street, and the two prior owners of the house in front each did some serious tree damage. So I was worried we were about to lose more habitat, more shade, more beauty. I paced. I texted Michael. I peeked out through our curtains. When the tree men out front started waving and shouting cheerful insults down our driveway to the tree men out back, I nearly lost it completely.  

Yes, I am the lady who takes this photo. 

In the end, the carnage was relatively minor. The people behind us removed a few hemlocks on their street frontage, trees that I can barely see, there's so much other greenery in between. And the people across the road were simply letting the tree service use their driveway to access their neighbor's backyard to take down a minor and dead-looking trunk. No-one was touching that magnificent horse chestnut. For now, at least. But I'm watching, I'm watching. 

2026: April 19: New York City

Two and a half days in New York City is like a month in Binghamton. We crammed in so many things. A Top Ten Lifetime Meal in a very fancy Mexican restaurant, walking the Highline, bookstores, museums, hipster cocktails, all that happened before we even got to the main event - Death of a Salesman, on Broadway.

Us experiencing the sensory overload of Times Square on our way to the theater.   

Top billing was Nathan Lane as Willie Loman, and obviously he was very good. But Laurie Metcalf as Linda Loman, and Christopher Abbot as Biff, I can't stop thinking about their performances. Linda Loman could easily be a harridan, a sad victim of the false promise of capitalism to American masculinity. But Metcalf played Linda with power, sometimes taking her to Lady Macbeth-like heights, then laying her open with soul-scouring emotional honesty. The production was dark, the set looked like an abandoned subway station. Lines, scenes, and timeline switches layered quick-fire on top of each other, then slowed down to spare moments that let us absorb the impact of it all. 

Then, oh my goodness, then! We met Laurie Metcalf. She reads Michael's crossword blog and when she heard he was coming, she emailed and told him to come to the stage door after. I have never ever been to a stage door before. We walked past the lines of theater buffs waiting behind the sidewalk barrier, a man had Michael's name on his list and we went through the narrow back stage areas, waited, literally in the wings, and then Laurie Metcalf came out, with her little dog, and Michael talked to her and I may have said some things too, but who knows if I made any sense. (Okay, I know. I know that I did not make sense.) Laurie Metcalf was as delightful as you'd expect, more so, actually, given she'd just buried Nathan Lane. Then she had other people waiting to see her, and we said bye and went back outside. Two blocks later we stepped from the craziness of Broadway into the dark blocks of the Diamond District then wandered across a behemoth digging up the surface of Fifth Avenue and spewing it into a truck.

I guess they can't exactly repave Fifth Avenue during the day. 

The next day we had breakfast in an Australian cafe half a block from our hotel and took the most crowded train we've ever experienced back up the Hudson to where we'd left the car at the Beacon train station. Hudson River bird count included a bald eagle clutching a fish, a kingfisher, maybe an osprey, many cormorants, a swan, a heron, plus geese and ducks galore. 

2026: Sunday April 12: Birds

My first memory of anyone taking an interest in birds was Ingrid observing the tuis in the flax outside the kitchen window at our Brownville Crescent house, when I was a teenager. But there must have been earlier instances, because paying attention to birds just seemed like a reasonable thing for any person to do. Birds are everywhere, and if you're walking around with your eyes open, you're going to notice them. I don't know when birdwatching turned into a cliche about aging. Is that an American thing? People of a certain age reading binocular reviews and downloading the Merlin app to keep track of their life lists? (Guilty as charged). I don't relish being a cliche, but I guess somethings are unavoidable.

Michael checking out a cormorant in the middle of the pond. It's that little black dot you can just see if you squint, there, on the edge of the reflection of the trailer. The pond is usually the domain of the geese and the cormorants tend to stick to the river. But this one was sailing around like it owned the place while the geese watched uncertainly. (A double-crested cormorant, I believe)

Spring migrations have begun here in northeastern North America, and today our long Sunday walk went through what Michael terms "bird alley," a strip of Otsiningo Park, between the river and the highway, where bird calls compete with the sound of traffic. Brown-headed cowbirds. Black-capped chickadees. Goldfinches. Etc. We experienced some frustration because the app told us we were hearing flashes of a Rusty Blackbird, which neither of us had ever heard of before, and which we could not catch a glimpse of. Apparently they, or it, are on their way to breeding grounds in Canada, so their window of time here with us is small. Godspeed, Rusty Blackbird! 

2026: Saturday April 4: First Quarter Reading List

This quarter's list is a tad shorter than usual because one of the books was a tad longer. Dickens! Getting paid by the installment and just keeping on going and going and going. I thought it would never end. The only reason I read as many other books as I did is because the rest were shorter. 

Broome County Public Library

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son. 1848. I blame this on Michael. He decided to start the year with a Dickens and I wanted to be one of the cool kids too, so I also started the year with a Dickens. Thanks goodness the library no longer charges late fees, or I'd owe them a fortune. It took forever because I could only read a few (dense) pages at a time. Parts of it were genius and incredible for their time. The brutal indictment of marriage and conventional treatments of women. The skewering of ambitious men. The absolute psycho-sexual mind games of Dombey's side kick. There were lines that made me laugh. And then there were lines where I thought, Dickens old chap, you've already said this five different ways in the past two paragraphs, we get it. Oddly enough, this hasn't put me off the man. I'm thinking Nicholas Nickleby for next January, maybe. 

Some second hand book store or another. It has been sitting on the shelf waiting for me for a while.

Willa Cather, The Professor's House. 1925. A nice little palate cleanser. Second favorite Cather after Death Comes for the Archbishop. Just a fascinating personality study with a whole crazy other story dropped into the middle of it, because Cather can do anything she wants. 

Chaucer's Books, Santa Barbara

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, 2011. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on here. I could tell it  was very clever but I wasn't captivated the way I wanted to be. 

Michael brought this into the house and said I might like it and it has been sitting on The Pile for over a year

Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know: On Reading. 2018. I didn't know anything about Deborah Levy before I picked this up. It is memoir, but not the kind I expected - that "on writing" subtitle was slightly misleading. Well, maybe not entirely misleading, the book is about writing, but she arrives at the topic sideways and you've almost forgotten about that part of the title by the time you get there with her. Very clever and also captivating. 

Broome County Public Library

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. 2011. I read this for class and I liked it less than most of my classmates, so I kept my mouth shut during the discussion. The first couple of chapters were intriguing and pulled me along, fascinated, as Otsuka played with the form and told a dynamic story. Then her POV started to wear on me and the story became relentless - you know where it is headed and it is not one of the high points of American history. And I'm apparently pretty conventional after all, because I just wanted a character to follow. But, you know, respect for throwing down something different. [Edited to add that one of my classmates said that this was history written as poetry, and another said that since the piston of character is weaker, the pistons of language and narrative have to work harder, and both these helped me appreciate the book more]

Broome County Public Library

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake. 2003. I read this for class and I'd read it before but only remembered two things about it. I didn't realize it was groundbreaking until a fellow student talked about it as something that had laid the way for other immigrant stories. I guess I just forgot how long ago 2003 was. The book was better than I remembered, perhaps because I was reading it through the lens of class discussions about writers' use of time, point of view, tension, stakes, etc, and I could see how well constructed it was. Solidly satisfying read.