Val's Column

Emily wrote a letter about her nephew Gilbert to his mother just after he died which I think is a masterpiece. He was eight...

Robert Penn Warren:  “ ...in the heart’s last kingdom, only the old are young.”                                ...

  I am now at the Great River, the Saint Lawrence River, and can see across to the other side to Canada. This place has extr...

 We get glimpses of the possibility that it works out far better than we ever could have imagined. One of those glimpses recently for me has...

  Sometimes I am surprized to find the most helpful bits of wisdom at expected places and times, and which stick with me, trans...

You may have noticed recently that a tenant decapitated an older gentleman, a nice guy, in Hartford, Connecticut, who was renting a room ...

One of the things I like most about dreams of the night is that they do not back off from reality. If they see that something...