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By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. With our mild weather so far this year, New Hampshire has avoided calamitous climate change. Texas hasn’t been so lucky with its...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. What would an old Yankee think? Around Jenness Pond, it used to be an April Fool’s joke to tell folks the ice was out when it wasn’t....

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. Traditionally, New Hampshire folks have been known to be self-reliant, maybe to the extent of appearing standoffish, because of our...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. We fool ourselves by believing if only we had more facts and better technology, we could solve any problem, even climate change and,...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. As a teenager, I avoided silence at all costs. Even in nature, I had a crackling transistor radio glued to my ear, tuned to the beat of...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. Listening to PBS like the old fogy I am, I discovered that among the hip, a new fiction genre is sweeping the country: It’s called...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. When I was young, I wasn’t religious. After I got back from Vietnam, God was dead. Enchantment was a foreign concept to me. A rare...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. How the world changes. I have an anxiety disorder. In the psychological stone age that existed sixty years ago, I repressed that...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. I have fond memories of “old skinny,” a super-flexible carving knife my father cherished that had been passed down from his father. We...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. A few years ago, I photographed five vultures attempting to warm up on a cold winter morning by spreading their wings toward the sun. I...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. Why do so many obituaries praise the dead for waging a heroic battle against their fate? Why does death have to be described as such a...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. The cricket’s persistent song of autumn used to haunt me, reminding me how brief life is, especially now I’m old. But it doesn’t have to...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. Being blind doesn’t mean you can’t see.I had an epiphany reading about how a blind man could still see — and, surprisingly, in a more...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. As I write this, Lee, a major hurricane, is slowly churning northward off the eastern seaboard. While it’s too early to tell where it...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. I thought I had retired as a psychotherapist, but I continued on by other means writing a My Turn column every week for the Concord...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. Remember “The Truman Show,” the hit movie starring Jim Carrey about “a man who grew up living an ordinary life that — unbeknownst to him...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. I was struck by a recent essay by Timothy Denevi in the New York Times about the writer Joan Didion. On the surface, it seems strange...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. I wrote in my last My Turn column about the power of advertising to seduce folks into buying things they don’t need. I foggily...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. L. M. Sacasas is the author of an illuminating newsletter, The Convivial Society, tracing the intersection of technology, society, and...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. Making things with your hands gets a bad rap today. It’s so blue-collar. You’re a failure if you don’t go to college to get a...

By JEAN STIMMELL

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. I was taken aback when I heard she had written a new book. She had disappeared from sight over 30 years ago after a devastating injury....