The Tumbrel Diaries

For some weeks past there has been an occasional pre-dawn visitor to my garden—an especially large and elegant skunk. She sashays slowly acr...

I have lately been pondering some matters connected with Anglo-Indian language, prompted in that direction not merely by current events ( ...

Indigenous Australians have traditionally avoided naming the dead, as much a mark of respect for those who survive them. The taboo is insepa...

Thanks once more to my colleague David Hansen, and through him also to John McPhee, I am put in mind of all things queer and opposite by thi...

I had a note from someone at the New York Times asking me for comment. She wrote:“Wacky nail polish colors seemed to be just a passing tren...

Aunt Jean’s clippings continue to yield treasure. Among them she preserved an article by H. Drummond Gauld in the Weekly Scotsman , Saturd...

Aunt Jean preserved an issue of the Eskdale and Liddesdale Advertiser printed on Boxing Day 1888 (a Wednesday), in which the following long...

To my astonishment—and this seems so right, so neat, and so symmetrical—Uncle Roy’s wedding in 1920 to Aunt Maida brought the surviving Pear...

Aunt Jean held onto an issue of The Border Magazine, An Illustrated Monthly Devoted to Border Biography, History, Literature, and Folklore ,...

“Commotion,” the 22-acre property where Uncle Roy and Aunt Maida lived for two or three years between their marriage and his death in 1923, ...