Author: Carolyn Vibbert, Illustrator

A few weeks ago, my wife said to me, “I think I’d like some sunlight in my office.” I’ve been married long enough to know that this simple proclamation signaled a major space and design change in our basement, and…

We’re having a little landscaping done in our backyard. Not on purpose, mind you. Nor are there any plans. Also, no one has been hired to do this. This landscaping all appears to simply happen organically. Each time we look…

Here’s a quick interior design quiz: When a seven-year-old lives in your home, what decorating feature dominates each and every room? Think about that while I tell you a story. A few weeks ago, I received an email from a…

We are sauntering through the back side of Stratham Hill, a small park in Portsmouth, with an observation tower and plenty of rocks. We are, in fact, looking for one rock in particular, the oddly named Kitty Rock—so named because…

Learning to be present this holiday season.

My husband calls them New Hampshire potatoes, the hundreds of rocks we pick from our garden every spring, heaved to the surface by winter’s churn of frost and thaw. We’ve been planting here for twenty-five years. My in-laws turned over…

Although I came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I have always thought of myself as a child of the Depression. My Depression-era mother schooled me in saving anything that could be used again and making do…

Last fall, a band of nimble men descended on our house. They ripped off crumbling shingles, tore up rotten plywood and installed a new metal roof, guaranteed for fifty years, considerably longer than I—at age sixty-five—expect to need it. Standing…

My last act of renovation—if it can be called that—will be to find a good steward for this house going forward.

As a forager from a long line of foragers, nothing pleases me more than finding wild berries. I will scale a small mountain for low-bush blueberries that ripen in high summer just short of the peak. Sometimes abandoned roads pass…

I used to be an herbicidal maniac. Woe betides any plant that found itself under the deadly-by-default care of my gangrene thumbs. Then, with the purchase of our home in 2013, my husband and I inherited a bountiful 50-foot-by-150-foot garden…

At Home in New Hampshire