Stories
Alicea Charamut went for a hike last weekend to a place where she thought her dog would have a chance to cool off with a swim. Devil’s Hopyard State Park, in East Haddam, Connecticut, has a big waterfall. But on this day, the water was barely flowing and Charamut’s dog found no relief. “There was…
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Local business owners in Holyoke, Massachusetts, are paying homage to a Puerto Rican festival of the saints this weekend by having their own celebration in the city’s downtown. Commonly known as Fiestas Patronales, the annual celebration is a prominent festival in Puerto Rico where each municipality on the island celebrates one saint. This is the…
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Most of the year, New Hampshire’s Forest Health team is on the ground, in the woods, doing what they can to protect the state’s trees. But for a few days every summer, they get to soar above it all. Foresters Bill Davidson and Kyle Lombard make up the two-person operation affectionately known as the Bug…
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On a recent morning in downtown Portland, a woman named Vitoria was waiting at a bus stop on Congress Street. Vitoria is an asylum-seeker from Angola, who arrived in Maine just a few weeks ago with her husband and two young children. On this day, she was trying to find her way to one of…
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Netia McCray likes to start her day with a cup of coffee. But sometimes, making that cup can be too much. McCray became sick with COVID more than two years ago and never fully recovered. Since then, simple tasks deplete her energy. She still has trouble breathing, moving and thinking clearly. It takes her hours…
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People normally aren’t excited to find garbage on the bottom of a pond, but for an unusual group of underwater trash collectors on Cape Cod, there’s a certain exhilaration when the biggest discovery of the day suddenly appears 8 feet below the surface. “We found the tire!” exclaims Diane Hammer, who sits in a kayak…
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In the 1980s, a rare and elusive amphibian called the spadefoot toad vanished from its habitat in Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod. For the last decade, conservationists have tried to bring it back. Now they believe they’ve reached a breakthrough in that quest. The story begins each year in springtime, when Mass Audubon researchers don…
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Janeth Valdez usa un complicado delineador dorado. Ella dice que siempre ha sido muy femenina, por lo que decidió iniciar su propio negocio de maquillaje. A cada paleta le ha dado un nombre que representa su personalidad. Está “soñadora”, “fisgona” y “ asesina”. Valdez vendía maquillaje para una gran empresa multinacional pero estaba cansada de…
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Janeth Valdez wears a complicated gold eyeliner from her own makeup line. She says she has always been very feminine, so she decided to start her own makeup business. She has given each palette a name in Spanish that represents her personality. There is “the dreamer,” “the snooper,” and “la asesina,” which she translates as “the badass.”…
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Oxygen is beer’s enemy. Carbon dioxide is its protector. Brewers rely on CO2 to keep oxidation from ruining batches of beer. But a growing shortage of this critical gas is beginning to impact production at some Massachusetts craft breweries. Many U.S. breweries have struggled to find CO2 because of pandemic-related supply chain issues, but Mass. Brewers Guild executive director…
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