Winter Carnival is good group therapy. I thought about this last week as I drove out to Bloomingdale to work on our parade float. I thought about how Carnival brings people together across the many things that divide us. You might go down to Lake Flower to cut and stack ice with friends and ...

Spin, clap! Roll hands low, roll hands high! Spin, clap! Roll hands low, roll hands high! We pass Garden Street and the Adults Center, and swerve a few steaming piles of dung from the bleating protests of four goats being reluctantly tugged by the local 4-H club. Volunteer firefighters, ...

Winter can be a good time to sit by the fire and read someone’s memories of a long ago trek through the Adirondacks. By chance I found a copy of “Friendly Adirondack Peaks,” by Robert Wickham, published in 1924. Why not find out what such an undertaking would have been like exactly a ...

On these subzero winter days, reading is sometimes wiser than going outdoors. A reflection of my age, no doubt. To ward off cabin fever, I’ve been rereading some of the mountaineering classics. I decided on the oldest mountaineering book in my collection. Robert Bates’ “Five Miles ...