I was a prairie schoolmarm, teaching a few miles from where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived. I would have looked familiar to Wilder, as I wore practical, sturdy, blue jean jumpers with cargo pockets, cotton tights, and brown, hook-and-eye boots. To encourage a former student to apply to Harvard, I applied as a ploy, was shockingly […]

Unlike my neighbors, who met E.B. White at the post office and general store, I only met him in his books and essays. I bought my house in Brooklin, Maine, too late to be his neighbor or even do anything other than drive past his old house, where the people who bought it stapled a […]