Unless you’re looking for it, the Edwards Farm in Orient can easily escape your notice.
You come upon it on the south side of Main Road just west of Latham Sand & Gravel and less than a mile before you reach the entrance to the Orient Point ferry. The Edwards name is nowhere to be found on a small beige sign with red lettering that identifies the property only as a “Peconic Land Trust Preserve.” READ
Being of a certain age, I still like to buy the print editions of English-language newspapers when traveling abroad. And I’ve been able to get them, even in countries like China and Myanmar (Burma), where press freedom is severely restricted. But in Moscow two years ago, there was an unwelcome surprise. READ
It was election night in 2008 and I was in a packed hotel ballroom in downtown Cleveland surrounded by campaign volunteers for Barack Obama who’d gathered before a giant TV screen to watch him deliver his victory speech after winning the presidency.
And deliver he did. READ
When Al Gore’s supporters blamed a third-party candidate, Ralph Nader, for his narrow defeat by George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election, the renowned consumer advocate quipped that Mr. Gore had taken votes away from him.
Democrats didn’t find Mr. Nader’s rejoinder very funny. READ
“I plan to vote for Bernie in the primary but Hillary in the general election.”
I’ve been hearing that refrain fairly frequently from my Democratic friends as New York’s pivotal April 19 presidential primary approaches. READ
As Jeanne Markel tells it, she and her husband were so enthusiastic about their two Volkswagen “clean” diesels that the couple sang their praises to practically anyone who’d listen. READ
When the Daily News ran a photo of Congressman Lee Zeldin last week, it was the kind of publicity our representative could do without. READ
For more than 35 years, I’d been looking longingly at a picture of a lighthouse on a spectacular headland jutting into the Atlantic near the westernmost tip of the British mainland. Someday, I vowed, I would go there. READ
The view behind Latham’s farm stand in Orient. (Credit: Grant Parpan)
“When I cross that causeway, my whole mood changes.”
My friend was referring to the emotional lift she gets every time she enters Orient from the west. No wonder. What greets her eyes is a sublime view of fertile farmland sloping down to wetlands and, beyond them, the ever-alluring waters of Orient Harbor with Shelter Island as a backdrop. (more…)
Michael and Alison Ventura outside their historic Village Lane home in Orient. The Cape Cod dates back to the 1700s. (Credit: Grant Parpan)
On picture-postcard-pretty Village Lane in Orient, residents worried not long ago about the fate of one of the street’s genuine treasures — a simple but handsome Cape Cod house that may date as far back as the 1700s.
Neighbors watched with dismay as the front stoop of the house at No. 1780, in the heart of the hamlet’s prized National Historic District, disintegrated — one of them repaired it gratis — and a covered porch tilted so precariously that the owner had to remove it. (more…)