Central Market, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Central Market, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Photo: George Sheldon / Shutterstock.com The pungent odorof horseradish follows youpast butchers, bakers,and florists, past glazed donuts, hard pretzels, and youngMennonites tying cherrystems in knots with tongues. Andy Brown is a freelance writer and editor of Scrawl...
My Lost Vowel

My Lost Vowel

Photo of Putneyville, Pennsylvania, by Dale Johnson. All rights reserved. 1. The Pittsburgh Chain Shift uniquely identifies Southwestern Pennsylvania. Neither tectonic nor glacial, it is a linguistic distinction. As the nineteenth century Scotch Irish, English, and...
Late Night Past the Occidental Cigar Club

Late Night Past the Occidental Cigar Club

We’re walking in San Francisco and it’s getting late. I’m here in The City and it has been such a long time. A lot of time has passed. A lot of heavy time. It weighs on me as I return to familiar places and I feel aged, but you have to pronounce it...
Summer Sippers

Summer Sippers

Photo by Boston Public Library / CC BY-NC 2.0 We show our love by slurping oysters, three dozen to be exact—two dozen raw and unadorned, a dozen served “dirty,” splattered with sour cream, red onion and red lump caviar. All doused with lemon and Tabasco. Dad and I are...
Honey Island Swamp

Honey Island Swamp

Less than 100 yards down the sloughthis swamp’s so thick it’s easy to imagine a world where carsdon’t exist, where a breeze is worth more than gold.The water under your boat, the mess of palmettos lining the shore,the bald cypress blocking sun— everything, all of it,...
Queen Bess Island

Queen Bess Island

Pull your boat up to the shore here nowwith hundreds of pelicans in flight above the island, their nests scatteredin the mangrove bushes all over this place, and you’d never guessit was a ghost of itself five years ago, just a ring of stone with barely enoughgrass to...