David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Place, Time & Peter Yarrow

The highlight of Pete Seger's Clearwater’s festival, an annual weekend of music and ecological awareness along the river in Croton-on-Hudson, New York was neither a scheduled performance by one of over fifty talented musicians who’d come to share their music, nor an impassioned plea for the many pressing social and environmental causes represented by colorful displays and petitions circulating among the thousands attending.  Rather, it was an impromptu gathering that mixed both song and social activism in a small, low key way.

When an announcement was made on Sunday afternoon that Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame would give a tribute to the late Mary Travers in the small Jam Tent far from the big stages, I took notice despite all the distractions circulating around as I made my way through the crowd from one event to another.  Folks were urged to bring their instruments and voices to join in with each other and I knew I had to be there.

The Rock Where Moses Stood

Okay, so it wasn’t that Moses.  Of course, he did discover a promised land of sorts along Lake Erie in Ohio.  Also, it wasn’t a rock, but the stone door step slab, well curb, and fieldstone foundation on which the long gone house once stood along a bucolic stretch of Route 169 in Canterbury, Connecticut.  The spot is marked by this sturdy cast metal sign erected for the state’s tercentenary in 1936.  There appears to be a bullet hole through the year of death and a few dings from other rifle shots.

Common Ground: Seeking Town Greens

Hartford Courant, June 12,2011

Perhaps there’s nothing more quintessentially New England than the town green. Beloved by natives and visitors alike, it conjures images of a white clapboard church and colonial houses around a neat rectangle of grass featuring tall trees and sometimes a granite Civil War soldier standing sentry atop a pedestal.

Connecticut has about 170 town greens and no two are alike. Sometimes they aren’t even recognized as such because they are small, out of the way, dominated by memorials, or appear more like parks than the town commons of our imaginations. They’re parks with a past, sometimes the only physical remnant of a world envisioned by the original Puritan settlers. Their condition speaks volumes about a town.

Season of Smells

For most of us, this is the season of flowers.  Bright blossoms catch the eye with every glance and the  perfume of peonies and emerging roses float in the air.  On hazy, oppressively humid days when the atmosphere hangs on my shoulders like a wet towel and colors seem bleached, scents are particularly rich and vibrant.  My mind grows torpid in the heat while my nose is on an amusement park holiday.  Late spring may seem a riot of color, but to me it’s really a season of smells.

The Old Leather Man's Deepening Mystery (part three of three)

The third day of excavation dawned even darker than the first two, as if the elements themselves recognized the deepening quandary.  The trail of the Leather Man was becoming as indistinct as the  misting sky.  Running low on options, Bellantoni had the backhoe dig several parallel shallow trenches adjacent to the original site where there were no marked graves and the ground penetrating radar had shown some soil disturbance.  He and his colleagues worked like badgers, smoothing the excavations with their trowels and sifting through the loose soil, but hours of hard work bent into the dirt turned up only a few pottery shards and a flint arrowhead.  The Leather Man had again slipped the bonds of societal curiosity.