Essays
Impossible Infinity
ESSAY-Nov/Dec 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” -Blaise Pascal
Reflection
ESSAY-October 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.” -e.e. cummings
All the In-Betweens
ESSAY-September 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
You Are Here
ESSAY-August 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” -Henry David Thoreau
Dog Days
ESSAY-June 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
“We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.” -George Eliot
The pitter-patter of paws on wood floors made its debut in our home a few weeks ago. The sound now resides alongside alarm clock beeps and tea kettle whistles and doorbell rings. The culprit is part border collie, part labrador retriever, part imp, part charmer. His paws and tail look like they have been dipped in white paint and his chest boasts his softest patch of fur. He leaps in the air like a jackrabbit when he wants to play tug-of-war, and when he grows tired, he quietly excuses himself and heads up the stairs, where he gives in to doggie dreams in the spare bedroom. He cocks his head to the side when we say “walk” and “cookie” or any word that sounds remotely close to either. At 8 years old, he is sweet and well trained, and in the morning, when his ears feel cold, I invite him up on the bed “just this once.”
Searching for Summer
ESSAY-May 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
A Maine free from winter’s clutch is mere folklore as I write this, a foreign experience to a newcomer who made the state home on the first day of winter. My belief in summer here is based on faith alone, although evidence is mounting in its favor. I have heard tales of glowing beach days, seen photographs of ground and sky in bloom, and found closets where flip-flops hibernate. The other day I noticed something stuck to the fence near the driveway: packing tape from the frenzied move-in day three months ago. It had been buried during the unrelenting snowstorm that welcomed us, its illicit presence finally visible as the remaining heaps of white retreat. As the stretch of gray slush fades, the change of atmosphere is palpable. Cozy frost-filled days are all I know of Maine so far, but soon, lush greens will compete with clear blues, and sea-soaked warmth will surround.
The Work of Art
ESSAY-April 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.” —Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)
With the buzz of cocktails and jazz from the mezzanine still fresh, I bounded down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art into the nighttime symphony of taxi horns on Fifth Avenue, and purchased my first work of art. I was just out of college and an immense, pulsating New York was still new.
Settling In
ESSAY-March 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
Stumbling across an old friend in a new place is one of the happiest comforts in life. The other night, at a pub down on Commercial Street, I got together with a friend I hadn’t spoken to in six years. We had been roommates many years ago, and for no particular reason—other than she moved back to her native Maine and I to New York City—we lost contact. Seeing her familiar face in this still-unfamiliar setting was like finding a lighthouse on a stormy night at sea. All of the introductions and first-time conversations of recent weeks faded into the background as I enjoyed a relaxed exchange with an old friend. I had been granted a break from having to provide context for my life or engaging in small talk; here was someone who had shared a small space with me for a year, who knew my life story, and who could predict what I was going to say next. Despite the years between our conversations, we reconnected as if our last good-bye was yesterday. We spoke in a flurry of “Remember whens” and “Where are they nows,” condensing six years into two hours of recognizable laughter and familiar gestures. It happened in an unlikely environment—a place she has always called home, a place I am only just discovering.
Coming Home to Maine
ESSAY-JAN/FEB 2009
by Rebecca Falzano
My journey from New York City to Maine happened by way of California—specifically somewhere between Yosemite National Park and the Pacific Coast Highway. I was on a two-week summer road trip with my boyfriend, and while we were marveling at giant sequoias and monoliths, we suddenly and wholeheartedly had a bit of a realization: our lives could exist elsewhere and be perfectly okay. Of course this shouldn’t have come as life-altering news, but when you live in New York City long enough, it’s easy to become so blinded by its vitality, energy, and vibrancy—not to mention all the opportunity and possibility—that you can’t imagine life elsewhere. But after five years living there and just fourteen days on an opposite coast, it had become clear that the city we once couldn’t imagine living without would soon go on living without us. And we, and it, would be just fine.
Another Dog's Death
ESSAY - NOV/DEC 2008
by Joshua Bodwell
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.”
—Ernest Hemingway
There is a field behind my parent’s home. Beyond the field there is a wide stone wall, and beyond the wall are young, damp woods. In the field, there are several leafy clumps of trees. At the bottoms of the trees, under a carpet of pine needles, moss, and leaves, are mounds of small rocks that were piled there a hundred years ago when farmers cleared the fields for planting.
In The Current
ESSAY - OCTOBER 2008
By Joshua Bodwell
“My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane” —Robert Frost
Independence
ESSAY - SEPTEMBER 2008
By Joshua Bodwell
“How could I explain to him except right now, here, that being absent made no difference to being present.”
from “The Shepard Didn’t Want to Be Buried Now” by David Mason Heminway.
Late in the afternoon on the Fourth of July—when the air was still heavy and many hours before firework flowers blossomed in the darkened night sky—my great uncle drew in his last strained breath. His tired lungs could not keep pace with his keen mind. He closed his intense blue eyes. He had fought long enough.
Keeping Faith
ESSAY - AUGUST 2008
By Joshua Bodwel
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” —Daniel Burnham
For a short time after graduating from high school, I languished. During the summers that I turned nineteen and twenty, I waited tables at the Colony Hotel in Kennebunkport. That grand old lodge, built in 1914, teeters atop a rocky promontory overlooking the Kennebunk River flowing into the Atlantic.
July, July, Your Tides Tug My Heart
ESSAY - JULY 2008
By Joshua Bodwel
“It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow.” —Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine.
We planned our day by the tides.
Arrive
ESSAY - JUNE 2008
By Joshua Bodwell
“Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.” Antoine de Saint-Exupér.
A few weeks ago, I arrived home from my third trip to work as writer-in-residence at a boy’s prep school in southern London. As I sat in the airport, waiting for my flight to Boston, I thought about my first time on English soil: it was a five-hour layover at Heathrow on a flight home from Milan, after spending ten days sitting by older brother’s hospital bed in Nice, France.
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