My 65-plus years have seen many haircuts. Growing up, the only folks in my family who got regular, “real” haircuts were the men. I went along when our dad took my brother for his first haircut. That little barbershop with its red and blue barber pole going around outside is still there. The barber with […]

What is a haircut if not the style your head wears that may define (or confine) your persona? What is a haircut if not the physical outer image of what lies within? And to wax even more philosophically, is our choice of haircut meant to defer or refer to our individual personalities? And so it […]

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with haircuts. According to my parents, I did not enjoy my first trip to the barber shop. When documenting the occasion in my baby book, my mom charitably wrote: “He didn’t like it!” She later told me she didn’t want to write that I screamed my head off the […]

A thick white sap oozed from the diagonal slash in the bark of the tree. Gravity gently pulled the liquid downward toward half of a coconut shell fastened to the tree trunk to collect this precious resource. I stood in the middle of a rubber tree forest in the rural inland foothills of Sri Lanka, […]

As a young child living in Portland in the 1960s, I would be beyond excited when my parents would plan a summer weekend excursion with my brother and me to our great-aunt and great-uncle’s rural farm in Madison. After a nearly two-hour drive, we would finally pull up to the circular, dirt driveway of Uncle […]

As a child of the inner city, I was seduced by three manifestations of “rural” and what that meant: yellow school buses, “RFD” on mailboxes and a fifth-grade field trip to Cook’s Canyon, a wildlife sanctuary in Barre, Massachusetts. City buses were ubiquitous in Worcester, a part of the urban landscape as they plied their […]

I would like to take this time to offer my thanks to the editors of this feature because this topic has been on my mind my entire life. I have been asking the same question for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been an in-town gal. When I was growing up, my family […]

When I was in seventh grade, my family acquired an old farmstead reclaimed by the forest. We worked on the weekends, clearing land that would become the driveway, erecting outbuildings, slowly turning the place back into a recognizable farm. By the time I got to high school, my morning duties involved feeding the pigs while […]

When I grew up rural it was equated with being deprived. A country bumpkin less than best, automatically so. How could you be better than those who lived in town? Your bus ride to school included fellow students who didn’t bathe daily, especially in the winter, although their farm chores remained in place. Indoor plumbing […]

I left the rural state of Maine in 1976. My baby boomer buddies and I had always been taught that we lived in a rural state. Fish, lobsters, lumber and paper, blueberries and potatoes were always named as the principal products. I had always enjoyed walking on the beach and in the woods. Heck, I […]