Stories
‘An Economic Tsunami’: Cape Cod Businesses Weigh Reopening Ahead Of Uncertain Summer Season
Summer won’t be the same this year on Cape Cod. Many businesses in the region rely on tourism during the warmer months. Gov. Charlie Baker is expected to announce the re-opening plan for Massachusetts on Monday, but with so much uncertainty and so many questions about how the state will reopen, some Cape Cod businesses are…
Read MoreConnecticut’s Reopening Presents New Challenges For Residents With Underlying Medical Conditions
Even before the stay-at-home orders were officially issued in late March, Sarah Keitt had begun a two-week period of quarantine in her Fairfield home, isolated from her husband and two children. “It was lonely, it was painful to have basically no contact other than yelling up and down the stairs to people,” she said. Keitt…
Read MoreIn mid-February, a nasty bug hit Matt Kelly’s whole Cambridge family. First, his wife, Annie, a teacher, got the fever, fatigue and cough, and lost her sense of smell. “And then it rapidly spread to me,” said Kelly, who publishes a newsletter on corporate legal affairs. “And then rapidly to our son, who’s in kindergarten,…
Read MoreA Laughing Club For When Life Just Isn’t Funny
It’s not easy to find levity in today’s world. That’s why Northampton, Massachusetts, acting teacher Gabe Levey created the Pioneer Valley Laughing Club. It’s a chance to act like things are funny, even when they’re not. At the first Zoom meeting of the laughing club — pandemic edition — Levey hosted about two dozen people…
Read MoreEvery morning from April to August, Mary Keleher puts her hair up in a ponytail and heads out to a Mashpee golf course, where she uses a rope-and-pulley system to lower white plastic gourds from trees. Inside each gourd is a nesting pair of birds. “They are a little antsy today. They fly off, they…
Read MoreMaine Farms Welcome A Surge In CSA Membership Sales
With the depletion of certain items on grocery store shelves and the disruption to the supply chain, there is one thing the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted, and that is the importance of locally grown food. In Maine and around the country, small farms in particular are seeing a surge of interest in what they have…
Read MoreAt Codman Community Farms in Lincoln, the beef cattle are grass-fed, pasture-raised and ultimately available for purchase at the farm store. Demand for the farm’s beef, along with free-range chicken and pork, has never been higher. “People are really coming out of the woodwork and really demanding this product,” said Jennifer Hashley, who manages the…
Read MoreFor more than 100 years, kids have flocked to summer camps in Maine to play in the woods, swim in a lake, forge new friendships and find a bit of freedom from their lives back home. But the new coronavirus is casting a cloud of uncertainty over how sleepaway camps might operate this summer —…
Read MoreSince the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) started a month ago, Lindsay St. Pierre has been living and breathing PPP loans. At 10 p.m. on a recent Monday, she was nearing her 14th hour of working on applications for the program, which offers small business owners a forgivable loan that covers two months of expenses, in…
Read MoreWhen Your Remote Classroom Is Your Car: How Some Rural Students Without Broadband Are Connecting
Even though school is closed, on a given day there are about a dozen cars lined up in the parking lot of Sanderson Academy in Ashfield with people using the school’s Wi-Fi. Natalie Szewczyk is one of them. The 18-year-old has turned her Toyota Corolla into a mobile work station. “I stay in my driver’s…
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