NEW YORK Attention boys: You will grow taller, sprout hair, sweat more, develop muscles, fight breakouts, acquire deeper voices and experience changes to your private parts. And those are just the basics! Dr. Cara Natterson, the pediatrician and Los Angeles mom who has connected with millions of young girls through her best-selling “Care & Keeping […]

CONCORD, Mass. Henry David Thoreau went to the woods because, as he famously put it, “I wished to live deliberately.” Two centuries after the “Walden” author’s birth, people are still deliberately following in Thoreau’s footsteps to discover Walden Pond, the little lake he immortalized. Whether you’re visiting Boston or the Berkshires, the pond and the […]

Here’s a ridiculously simple summer dessert — the happy marriage of blueberry pie and French toast with a little cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top. It’s perfect not only for blueberry lovers, but also for those home cooks who consider themselves dessert-impaired. For all of their wonderfulness, blueberries can be unpredictable, even in season. Some are […]

We have a rule in our house during the summer: No one talks about the date. We barely even talk about the day of the week. And we certainly do not countdown weeks until September. For most of the year, I am oriented to time like I am to direction when I am driving or […]

Are your plants looking lonely, surrounded by small patches of high-maintenance bare soil? If they look like they’re suffering in solitary confinement, maybe they are. Many plant and landscape experts have begun thinking of plants in terms of communities, instead of as individual specimens. They recommend that home gardeners look to the wild for inspiration. […]

SOUTH HERO, Vt. Abandoned rail lines have been converted into recreation paths all over the United States. But the Island Line Trail in Vermont is unusual: It includes a causeway that runs across the open waters of Lake Champlain, from the Vermont mainland to the island community of South Hero. And that causeway includes a […]

One time many years ago, I was riffling through my grandmother Ruth’s box of handwritten recipe cards when I pulled up short at the sight of the title of this recipe for Cheese Sandwich Souffle. Souffle? Fancy! But reading the details, I quickly understood that this item was nothing more or less than the wedding […]

One thing that readers frequently ask is whether our family has finally seen a moose. It’s become an almost yearly installment of this column when I tell you about our family’s quest to find a proper moose. By “proper” I mean one that is more than eight times my size and is bigger than any […]

Creative new shapes and technology mean that home lighting fixtures often do far more than provide illumination. They can be exciting and sculptural works of art. “Designs are now not only a source of light, but a distinctive feature of an interior design,” says New York architect West Chin. Chin recently hung a frothy cluster […]

A year ago, Alisa Clickenger helped organize a cross-country motorcycle trip for women to commemorate the 100- year anniversary of a most amazing ride by two sisters from Brooklyn, New York. The Sisters’ Centennial Motorcycle Ride honored the exploits of Augusta and Adeline Van Buren, who in 1916 rode motorcycles more than 5,000 miles across […]