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Writer and poet May Sarton prefaces her 1968 memoir Plant Dreaming Deep with an untitled poem whose last two lines are “…Homeward at last toward the native source /Seasoned and stretched to plant his dreaming deep.”
When HCA Healthcare stepped forward, they did far more than keep a hospital open. They preserved an anchor for the West Side, a part of the city that touches me deeply. And that anchor is not only holding steady, it is gaining strength.
I was talking to a friend on Friday, and we were discussing how everyone is different. We talked about how some people are introverts, some are extroverts, and some are ambiverts. Although I believe that everyone has tendencies of all three, people fall primarily into one of the three classifications.
So now it is time to plan for yet-another Sunday night Super Bowl party, another debauched outing where everyone tries to pretend that they’re not going to call out from work on Monday morning.
Throughout her 45-minute attempt at a victory lap, the Governor rattled off a laundry list of “accomplishments” and cherry-picked accolades from her time on the job. But at no point in her remarks did Ayotte display a genuine understanding of the dire financial straits that Granite Staters are facing under Republican leadership. And for all her talk about prioritizing affordability, she has a track record that says the exact opposite.
With February being Black History Month I thought I would dedicate this column to a woman I never met but I heard about my whole childhood, Fanny. Fanny was my mom’s caregiver when she was a little girl. Her parents were divorced, and this was in the 1920s, before divorce was common. My mom’s parents both worked, her father drove the 69th Street trolley in Philly and her mother worked in the PX at the Navy Yard. I think. My memory is not so great these days and my Mom is gone more than 20 years now.
At the February 3, 2026 meeting of the Manchester Board of Mayor and Aldermen, I spoke during the public comment portion to raise a practical issue related to snow removal and winter parking enforcement that many residents experience every winter, and to provide the Board with draft ordinance language for its consideration.
I could tell a hundred stories like this, but you get the point. Manchester isn’t a scary place. Unless, maybe you scare easily. I make an effort to talk to everyone that approaches me, and not everyone wants to do that. I accepted money from a drunk woman when she saw me walking home with the cat I’d just rescued in a rainstorm. I learned French behind Cat Alley from a Congolese man on my lunch break. Maybe doing those things are risky behaviors. I think they are the bare minimum of accepting socialization when it offers itself to you.
The documents released yesterday by the ACLU of New Hampshire confirm what many of us have feared: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been actively planning to build a detention facility in Merrimack while avoiding transparency and public input.
The home of Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania is not easy to get to, either, not being on the way to someplace or other. You have to want to go there. And yes, about 10,000 souls descended on Punxsutawney yesterday, as they annually do, to bear witness to Phil the groundhog’s winter predictions.
House Bill 1703 seemed to suffer a setback, but it may rear its head again, possibly in some revised form.
Trump wants a ballroom citing national security and a simple argument: ballrooms are protected play spaces. The ballroom resembles a fenced sandbox. A $400,000 sandbox, but a sandbox, nonetheless. Guests can safely play. Trump exiled respectable reporters from the White House, so he’ll get positive coverage of his ballroom playdates. Is it necessary?
The purpose of our NH car inspection system is safety – it is not a question of whether we should have an inspection system, but what kind of inspection system. It needs updating, not tossing out. I believe the newly proposed system includes a 3 year grace period for new cars where no inspections are necessary. Sounds very reasonable. Other such changes should be discussed.
The towel, I’m going to assume, fell from the rack this morning as The Blonde Woman and The Gray-Haired Man were hurrying to get ready for work—harrowed as they often are at 6:30 a.m. while I snooze on their bed—and failed to notice the towel on the tiled floor.
Of equal importance is the fact that, the more we talked, the more we reminisced. The more we reminisced, the more information we shared. The more information we shared, the more things I realized that we had in common.
Bob Baines’s greatest skill as mayor was to transform the daily details of running a city into something if not poetic then at least into something that transcended the smoke-filled backroom dealing city government is often associated with.
My journey from the Congo to the United States could only be possible here. Only in this country could someone arrive with little more than hope, determination, and faith in opportunity and begin to build a life. America made my story possible not because it is perfect, but because its promise insists that opportunity belongs to everyone.
That promise aligns deeply with the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
If there’s one thing most people will agree on it is that we are a polarized country. And the same is true for NH. For those who still believe there is hope (and I am one of those), there are some bills coming up in the legislature designed to diminish polarization and enfranchise voters – particularly Undeclared voters (about 40%, at this time). The bills are about replacing a two-party ballot system and moving to a single ballot (for the primary election).
I’m usually not one to wax philosophical about politicians, but there is one who stands out and played a pretty important role at a key moment in my life.
Manchester’s Bob Baines passed away Friday. He was the city’s mayor from 2000-2006.
I can see clearly through text that many of my classmates are using AI to write their answers. It has a distinct voice that you can spot from a mile away once you learn how to notice it. Repeated phrases with this fake-deep intensity that isn’t necessarily inappropriate, but a little weird for a 5-point response to a participation grade.