Helen-Chantal Pike

For just about all of us couch potatoes, the winter was a marathon of snow storms, school closings, and endless mornings of below-zero temperatues.

But for effervescent entrepreneur Terri L. Williams of Concord, the Northeast Kingdom's longest season was an idea incubation period for repositioning her latest business.

To read the rest (more…)

Like a first high school crush, some of us never get over the stories of Ernest Hemingway and his Parisian-based copains. While neither Vermont nor New Hampshire have cosmopolitan cities to rival Paris, they do have expatriates, none more obvious to me than the one-time New Jersey residents who voluntarily left home for the romance of (more…)

You’ve probably read at least one story about somebody who turned 50 and decided to change her or his life’s trajectory: lose weight, get a divorce (or married), change jobs (or where you live), take up sky-diving (or sing in a rock-and-roll band). For me it stacked up like this: one third of (more…)

It was so early that March morning fog sat on Moore Lake like a giant cotton puff, hiding not only the snow-capped Presidentials but also the ice blue of the dammed up Connecticut. Unlike the '90s when it took equipment to break into Asbury Park's Casino Arena and Palace Amusements to find forgotten stories, here all I had to do was waited patiently. This ritual, my life-long ritual, (more…)

When I moved to the Upper Connecticut River Valley for a new adventure, I hadn't done the math. Nor had I found the W.W. Norton letter about the official release date of Tall Trees, Tough Men - my dad's book whose research and writing occupied a goodly portion of my childhood. (more…)