Tag: E.B. White

E.B. White’s authentic Florida Christmas

December 24th, 2024

I found her standing on the hearth with her nose buried in a branch from a balsam fir, which she had hung over the fireplace. With it hung a harness strap of sleigh bells. The branch had unquestionably been whacked from a tree in the woods behind our son’s house in Maine and had made the long trip south. It wore the look and carried the smell of authenticity. “There!” said my wife, as though she had just delivered a baby.

E.B. White

E.B. White did the impossible, brought Christmas to Florida.

White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States: HarperCollins, 2014. pg 192
Reminiscing on the youthful 1909 Model-T

November 30th, 2024

It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before. Flourishing industries rose and fell with it. As a vehicle, it was hard working, commonplace, heroic; and it often seemed to transmit those qualities to the persons who rode it. My own generation identifies it with Youth, with its gaudy, irretrievable excitements; before it fades into the mist, I would like to pay it the tribute of the sigh that is not a sob, and set down random entries in a shape somewhat less cumbersome than a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

E.B. White

That from the essay Farewell, My Lovely!

I’d argue the miracle is happening twice. Watch this space.

Also, can you imagine living in an age where the 1909 Model T Ford was a symbol of Youth?

White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 202
Televisonless eccentrics

October 30th, 2024

I live on the Maine coast, to the east of Penobscot Bay. Formerly, this coast was not in the path of hurricanes, or if it was we didn’t seem to know it, but times change and we must change with them. My house is equipped with three small, old-fashioned radios, two of them battery sets, one a tiny plug-in bedside model on which my wife sometimes manages to get the Giants after I have turned in. We do not have television, and because of this curious omission we are looked upon as eccentrics, possibly radicals.

– E.B. White

That from the essay “The Eye of Edna”. A reflection on an approaching storm and the impact of communication technology.

White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 30
The Brown Egg of a Silver Cross

October 20th, 2024

Her egg is so richly brown, so wondrously beautiful as to defy description. Every fall, when the first pullet egg turns up on the range, I bring it into the living room and enshrine it in a black duckshead pottery ashtray, where it remains until Halloween, a symbol of fertility, admired by all.

– E.B. White

E.B. White is much more than Charlotte’s Web. His essay’s rip. Mesmerize.

How many writers lull you into reading a three page essay about brown eggs vs white eggs?

White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 75

Tag: E.B. White

E.B. White’s authentic Florida Christmas

Reminiscing on the youthful 1909 Model-T

Televisonless eccentrics

The Brown Egg of a Silver Cross