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By WILLEM LANGE

Our cab arrived at 4:40 a.m. on the dot and deposited us at the entrance to United Airlines about 5:30. Check-in was amazingly easy, and the trek to our gate likewise. We took off from Logan also on the dot — it seems to be true that the earlier in...

By WILLEM LANGE

Keeping up with the shenanigans of the Trump administration is like the old kids’ game of setting three frogs on a table and trying to stop them from jumping. As soon as you think you’ve got one outrage pegged, another pops up in a spot you didn’t expect.

By WILLEM LANGE

Some years ago my wife, my younger daughter, Martha, and I stopped for the night in the ancient town of Nettuno, on the west coast of Italy. It happened to be the feast day of La Madonna delle Grazie, a major festival featuring carnival rides, various team competitions and games of chance along the esplanade, followed by a parading of the enthroned Madonna by hundreds of costumed celebrants. (It was also the scene of a bizarre incident in which an Italian cop, who wouldn’t let me drive to our hotel because of temporary one-way signs, allowed me to back up two blocks instead. But that’s another story.)

By WILLEM LANGE

Years ago, during my days as a remodeling contractor, we often had to demolish an existing structure, a wall, or plaster and lath in order to begin to work our magic. I asked my guys to list such labor on their time cards as “R&T” — Ripping and Tearing — and couldn’t help but notice that the youngsters went at it with incredible gusto, often with sledge hammers and lots of noise and dust. My tools of choice were usually just a claw hammer and a small “flat bar,” which I found more effective and a lot less noisy and dangerous. My counsel to my men was often, “Pretend you’re a 70-year-old man and work more gently.” First thing I knew, I was that 70-year-old man, and began to ease myself out of a business that I really had enjoyed.

By WILLEM LANGE

The week started off at midnight Friday morning with a full lunar eclipse. A thick, rain-filled warm front followed right behind, and the snow began receding from my yard. Sugarmakers began posting steam-filled photographs of their operations, which will be followed shortly by more photos of two-wheel-drive cars mired up to their axles on country roads. A cardinal sang lustily from a tree down in the brook bed below my house. And best of all, it’s spring break for universities, so I’ve got company.

By WILLEM LANGE

The year 1985 has often moved me to invoke Shakespeare: “So fair and foul a year I have not seen.” But let’s focus on just the fair for the next few minutes.

By WILLEM LANGE

The events of this past weekend in the Mad River Valley of Vermont highlighted a well-known, but rarely discussed, feature of Washingon, D.C., politics: the tin ear. I like to call it the imperial ear. It listens, but doesn’t hear. Instead, it assumes. And last weekend, it assumed wrong.

By WILLEM LANGE

The news, the commentaries, the opinions and the speculations all flood in here like the water we used to shoot under dormitory doors with dustpans and watering cans. The net effect is hard to ignore. You’d have to be a confirmed Luddite or hermit to be unaware of it.

By WILLEM LANGE

I once had a student who collected inspirational quotes, aphorisms and sage-sounding advice. He’d become a leader of groups of young boys in a program that borrowed extensively from the Outward Bound model that posed challenges designed to stimulate personal growth and self-reliance, and made good use of all the little chestnuts he’d gleaned over the years. They originated with Goethe, Einstein, Buzz Aldrin, Walt Disney, Sir Francis Chichester, Beyond the Fringe. It didn’t matter. What mattered was what they said.

By WILLEM LANGE

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t looking forward to spending Saturday morning freezing my bippy on a frozen lake in Vermont. Friday had been really windy — windy enough to make Kiki think somebody was coming up the driveway in a large truck — and the thought of standing still in a snow-blowing williwaw while coolly (no pun intended) interviewing the recreation director of a resort was none too pleasant.

By WILLEM LANGE

What’s an old fellow to do? My sources of information are letting me down. The news of the day comes into my house mainly via the internet, a New York Times subscription, a couple of local newspapers and brief sessions with commercial-haunted CNN (insurance of all kinds, mesothelioma lawyers, and Medicare Advantage) while I’m cooking and eating meals in my kitchen. Not very elegant, but generally reliable, as nearly as I can tell by cross-checking.

By WILLEM LANGE

The New York Times, according to a friend of mine, advises us not to read or watch the news first thing in the morning. The resultant depression or confusion, apparently, can affect the rest of our day and our general affect. I concur. In old age, I’ve come to an increased awareness of the dark at the top of the stairs. Now, suddenly, it’s equally as dark at the foot of the stairs. Every day’s news brings us what the Brits, during the Second World War, used to call “news of fresh disasters.”

By WILLEM LANGE

Those who’ve visited this column a few times before this may remember that I try to do one new thing each week. It’s a very stimulating sort of activity, and only rarely gets me into trouble I can’t handle easily; but the alternative life of humdrumming seems to me unendurable. It’s also, as you get older, more difficult to do, mainly because you’ve done so many things already.

By WILLEM LANGE

Living alone, as I do, and being an extrovert, which I am, I get a little lonesome at times. Not the hand-wringing lament sort of thing, but rather the recognition that it’s been a day or two since I’ve experienced human interaction. Kiki’s great, and a constant companion, but we don’t hold many two-way conversations in either of our native languages. So it’s pretty quiet around here, rather like a hermitage.

By WILLEM LANGE

I’ve looked out the windows quite a lot this past week, and each time the thought sweeps across my mind: Now, this is the way it’s supposed to be. Snow everywhere, and not just transitory, but settled in to stay a while. Thermometers at 10 degrees or below. It feels as though a cherished friend has returned home.

By WILLEM LANGE

One of the greatest cultural changes during my lifetime has been the democratization of air travel. In my early years it didn’t exist; travel itself was the privilege of the upper classes (a family opinion disapprovingly implicit, rather than...

By WILLEM LANGE

I was checking out at the supermarket the other day, and as usual fell into conversation with the checkout person, an elderly woman. She was sharing a bagger with the next lane over. When the bagger — another elderly lady — joined us, I noticed a...

By WILLEM LANGE

There are certain phenomena you can count on here in northern New England. Most are pleasant — migrating birds, the first snow, the aroma of boiling maple sap.Some are not. I’ve kept track of my first black fly each spring: average date, May 5, and...

By WILLEM LANGE

A couple of days ago I had to make an afternoon run a few miles east to the Health Center to pick up a fresh supply of one of my life-extending pills. Driving home, a few minutes after 4, I watched the sun disappear into a cloudy horizon. Erik the...

By WILLEM LANGE

Traveling from Nahant, Mass., to Montpelier, as I often do, requires working my way west through the stoplighted streets of Lynn, passing Hispanic churches, tire warehouses, convenience stores, discount gas stations, liquor stores and at least one...

By WILLEM LANGE

The other evening I pulled into the carport at the back of my house and before I turned off the ignition and opened the driver’s side door, I checked the outside temperature on the thermometer on the dashboard. Twenty-three degrees; cool enough. I...