A BLOG, BARELY: ​STORIES WRITTEN NOW AND THEN FOR THIS SITE
​        Plus, other intriguing content.  See also:  PUBLISHED ARTICLES

A BLOG, BARELY

​​​​​A Family of Ring-neck Pheasants Strives to Thrive in Vermont  

​They aren't natives and Vermont has not been an easy place for them to make a stand, but a group of these pheasants showed up on my land one year, made it through a winter, and the following spring, one male went looking for love in all the wrong places.  


Jack Jaffin, Mild-mannered Dentist by Day....  
Jack, a mysterious cousin of my mother's I had never met, was a New York City dentist with many famous clients for patients. A box of old family documents reveals that he had connections with movie stars, royalty, literary greats and leaders of the free world. One photo showed him strolling a New York street in 1941 with Edward VIII, Duke a Windsor, a presumed Nazi sympathizer, as was his wife Wallis Simpson. But such a friendship, in Jack's case, at that time, was puzzling indeed. Jack was born of at least one Jewish parent, if not two. There may have been an interesting  explanation for the company he kept.    



All Creatures Oddly Bright and Beautiful 
A  very unusual looking white-headed cardinal made an appearance at my bird feeder near White Bear Lake, Minnesota, three years ago, and it's still here. Such delighted sightings highlight the human tendency to place great value on rarity.    



Schmoozing with Schwartzenegger,
and other "This Actually Happened" Stories

Just a humorous collection of mildly interesting and amusing photographic moments I had, working as a communications officer and photographer for the State of Vermont.


​​Heartbeats of the City 
The short, lost history of the man behind the first tele-medicine of its kind, a remotely operable EKG device he invented in 1926, decades before anything else like it came into use. It's also the larger story of his efforts to bring medical care to all in need in his city. 


The Mother of All Maples: An Impressive Find in a Family Sugarwoods in Orange, Vermont. A 5-minute slide-documentary.
When Dave Strong asked me to document the year-round work that goes into producing maple syrup on his family's land, I was bowled over by the enormous tree that stood as the "mother" of the grove.  It now holds a special distinction.   


Rock, Gravity, Friction: 

A celebratory reflection on Vermont's ubiquitous rocks walls. In dry-stone work, a building technique that uses no mortar, I see a drama between the forces of gravity and the graceful forms that resist it. Part of this piece features the dry-stone work of Vermont stonemason Thea Alvin (left, photo courtesy of Michael Clookey). Her work is as visually arresting as any I’ve seen in this state. I spoke with Thea recently at her home in Morrisville, Vermont, shortly before Oprah Winfrey's people were due to arrive to produce a segment on Thea for Oprah's Super Soul Sunday series.   






Ricka McNaughton Writing, Photography