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The Cassandra Pages
Arts and Letters, Nature and Spirit
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Memorizing a Poem
Elizabeth Bishop's "Wading at Wellfleet"
A Week in the Woods
Part IV
A Week in the Woods
Part III
A Week in the Woods
Part II
A Week in the Woods
Part 1
July 4th, 2026
Reflections on a Troubled Anniversary
Summer Sewing Adventures
This past week I went on a sewing binge. I’d been wanting to make something for a while, but my quite-small studio has been taken over with oil painting. I finished the canvas I was working on (more about that eventually) and was able to pack away the paints and palette and bottles of solvents and brush-cleaning supplies; that meant I had enough room to set up the ironing board and sewing machine…
A Sicilian Suite
by Derek Walcott
Lost
I received a call last week from a dear family friend, a friend of my childhood who spent so much time with us that I thought of him as my big brother. He said he was wondering if I could help him with a question he had. When he went into the Navy many years ago, my mother had given him a scrapbook of photographs from a WWII sailor she had known well — a sailor who “didn’t come home.” My friend…
Palette
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Thinking Further About Our Online World
Thank you to everyone who commented or wrote to me after the previous post. The discussion in the comments was extremely thoughtful and honest; I’ve learned from what was said, and appreciate it. I’m going to quote from a few of them as this post proceeds. I've learned a lot from a whole lot of people and I'm grateful for that, but this can come at the expense of depth, of dialogue, of focus... So…
A Word to My Readers
Why Your Subscription Matters
My Beautiful Mother
My mother died twenty years ago today. I’m finding this fact hard to believe. When we were cleaning out our family house at the lake, there were trunks full of photographs. In albums, scrapbooks, framed, loose. I couldn’t keep them, so I photographed the ones I thought were the most important. Today I went back through those pictures and chose a few of my mother when she was young. I’m mostly…
Two Olive Grove Drawings
and a visit to Byzantine Mystras
Olive Trees
Ancient olive tree at dusk, Canicattini Bagni, Sicily . Oil on linen, 10” x 10”. For some people, the Mediterranean conjures visions of white-washed stucco, tile roofs, and lemons. For me, it’s the uncanny azure of the sea, the quality of the light, and olive trees. It astonished me, in Greece, to see entire mountains covered with olive trees growing wild. In Sicily and in Greece, I encountered…
Mothers' Day, the Complicated Version
My mother and my grandfather talking things over on the porch of our house in Sherburne, New York, around 1965. Yesterday, I was responsible for writing and delivering “the prayers of the people” at the cathedral. First I spoke about the world: In these times of instability, insecurity about the future, and desperate attempts to hold onto power, one of the most precious and most endangered things…
A Summer Landscape
In memory of Ann Robinson Misir, 1952-2026.
Instagram, Revisited
On February 19, I wrote this post about my reasons for taking a break from Instagram. It’s now nine weeks later. Lent, the ostensible reason for my “fast”, is long over. It wasn’t a total abstention — I did check once in a while to see if there were messages from people who hadn’t gotten the message that I wasn’t there…and in fact there usually were. I put up a 24-hour story notification when I…
The Bay of Naples
This 16” x 14” oil painting was started on the 30th of January. I worked on it off and on for the next three weeks, and then, feeling stuck, took it off the easel and hung it high up on one of my studio walls. In the past week I took it down, studied it, made some decisions, and finished it over the last three days. The view, looking west from Castel Sant’Elmo, on Vomero Hill in Naples, had…