Author: janaseitz1
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To The Sea
When I left NYC with my family on the Queen Mary 2, eastbound on a transatlantic crossing, I had my first true understanding of how connected to the sea the city is, a port town in every sense of the word. Police and fireboats hailed our exit, fishing vessels honked and sailors saluted as our…
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Beating the Daily Grind
“Only boring people get bored.” At least this is what I tell my kids when I hear the familiar whine. As says Eloise, my favorite children’s book character, “Getting bored is not allowed. Sometimes I comb my hair with a fork…..Kleenex makes a very good hat.” Or in grownup language: one can never get bored…
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A Look at Christmas Past
Some years preparing for Christmas comes as naturally as breathing; others, it’s a labor of love. When a labor, one relies on repetition and muscle memory to lay the groundwork as it’s been learned by rote all these years. Confident it will all get done, you build and it will come. Sort of like faith.…
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The Gold Coast
If you put your forefinger and thumb on a map of New York and gently squishWestchester County towards Long Island, pushing the waters of the Sound east into theocean, Rye would connect to the north shore right around Bayville. With a little luckEdith Read Wildlife Sanctuary could slide right through Oyster Bay and into Cold…
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Farmsteads
I’ve been fortunate enough to move to Scotland twice with my family, first for 6 monthsin 2010 and again in 2013 for a year. Whilst there, I had twelve hours a day to myselfafter the kids were whisked away by the school bus that would return them at 7pmwatered, fed and better educated than that…
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Gardens Abound
I fell in love with rockeries the year we lived in Scotland. To be fair, I fell in love with everything…butter, ice, the sea, silence. Even familiar things took on a patina of newness and adventure, my favorite combination. Our town park was walled and gated, concealing the magic within. When the door swung inward…
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A Fish Tale
There’s a secret language spoken around here come spring, one with catch phrases like“pulled him in on a blood worm” and “the boil could happen any day.” It passes likesmoke signals among men from the Hudson River to the Long Island Sound to theAtlantic. I set out to understand it recently and found it wasn’t…
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Happy Trails
I’ve accidentally established a quaint routine for the end of Darkness. Each year as the clock springs forward to herald the happy fact that we survived winter, I grab my repair kit and some young children and head out to work on the Manursing Alligator, an old log on the side of the road, which…
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Oh Little Town of Bethlehem…PA
I have already opened my best Christmas gift of the year, a treasure trove of history I inadvertently fell into last week while following the star of Bethlehem….to Pennsylvania. I went searching for adventure in shopping and returned with a whole new understanding of the spread of Christianity through the New World. I have already…
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Indian and Cowboy
Hats off to campers. I admire them and aspire to be more like them. But I’m not. I’m too old and achy to sleep on the ground by choice unless fallin’down drunk. I’ve had my share of camping trips, most enjoyably by the banks of a running river which lulled me to the land of…