Susan Harlan | The Common

A Cabin and a Dog

November 20, 2019 Dispatches

Fries, VA

I like to find quiet mountain cabins where I can read and write over the weekends, and I always take my dog Millie. She’s a 60-pound tan dog with pretty eyes. A mutt. I got her at a nearby shelter nine years ago, and now she’s eleven.

A couple of years ago, we started going to a cabin in Virginia, about an hour and a half from my home in central North Carolina. The cabin was built in the 1940s, and it’s a ways down a bumpy dirt road, with no marked street address. There’s a creek on the property and a one-mile trail behind the cabin to the New River.

Essential Summer Reads 2019

July 13, 2019 News and Events

With July well underway, we’ve put together a list of transportive pieces that encapsulate the spirit of summer—the dust above the country roads, the coolness of the waterfronts, the anticipation of autumn, and of course, the sticky, melting sweetness of ice cream. Take a trip through space and time with these summery selections.

January in the Jardin de Luxembourg

April 24, 2019 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

Paris, France

Today the gardens are made of four colors: the white-gray of the sky and the statues, the black of the branches, the green of the grass and chairs and benches, and the tan of the gravel paths.

Holiday in Queens

December 19, 2018 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

Queens, New York

1. On the W, December 23

When I’m back in the city and on the subway, I tend to look at my book or at my feet and the feet of other people. I note the different kinds of shoes, their colors and states of wear.

Today is December 23, so there are shopping bags by all the shoes, held fast between lower legs and sometimes kicked out of the way of people coming and going. Bags filled with brown boxes and shoe boxes and stacks of folded clothes.

I’m sitting down, and a man stands above me with his back to me. Under his left arm is a cardboard box that says 6H on the side in thick permanent marker. He never turns around, and I never see him, but I know that he lives in 6H.

The Little River

September 19, 2018 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

The Little River isn’t very little or rather
I don’t know what it is little in relationship to.
By the bank the water is smooth as paper
but in the middle my sneakered feet are unsteady
pulled by the current.

The Iron-On Labels

August 9, 2017 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

In the late eighties, when I was twelve, I went to a camp called Walking G Ranch. My sisters went, too. It was in the mountains of California, in Taylorsville, but now I have to look that up on a map because when you’re a kid you never know where you are. It was a working ranch, and we all got up early in the morning to take care of the animals – milk the cows and feed the pigs their slop – and sometimes at night, my friend Anne and I slept in the hayloft. On other nights, we rowed out to a little island in the middle of the pond. It felt immensely far, but it was just a pond.

The Last Day of the Off-Season

May 17, 2017 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

Townsend, Tennessee, US

Tomorrow is Spring Break – Monday, the start of the season – and kids and families and everyone will come. But tonight it’s still quiet (has been since the day after Thanksgiving), and I have the motel and the campfire and the geese all alone.

The trees say nothing of spring. They speak only of winter, with their bark and branches.

Only three cars are parked at the motel. Two big trucks and mine. Townsend is right next to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The town calls itself “the quiet side of the Smokies.” Seventeen miles down the two-lane Highway 321 is the other, not quiet side of the Smokies: Pigeon Forge, home of Dollywood.

The Pennies of Corsicana

February 28, 2017 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

CORSICANA BRICK CO. So say the bricks, cut within an inch of their lives, and the wet leaves like beetles’ wings, caught in the cobbles. We are the bricks’ leaves, they say, under my feet.

The color of the leaves is the color of the rusty railroad spikes that I gathered in the rain. Illegally, it would seem. Property of the train company, I’m told – possessed by others.

Fire in Tennessee

November 30, 2016 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

Today was on fire. I drove under a mountain on fire, the sun red in winter trees.

The cars on the two-lane highway stopped to watch the sun and smoke. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the traffic usually just stops for bears, which you might see far off, a black rustle in leaves or branches, or not at all.

Summer at the Brooklyn Army Terminal

September 21, 2016 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

Brooklyn, New York, US

This July and August, I stayed at my friend Sarah’s apartment in Brooklyn while she and her family were in Vermont. The original plan was that I would cat-sit their black cat Buster, but they had a mouse problem at their Vermont place, so after ten days or so, they drove back into the city to reclaim Buster and put him to work.

All posts tagged: Susan Harlan

A Cabin and a Dog

Essential Summer Reads 2019

January in the Jardin de Luxembourg

Holiday in Queens

The Little River

The Iron-On Labels

The Last Day of the Off-Season

The Pennies of Corsicana

Fire in Tennessee

Summer at the Brooklyn Army Terminal

Discover the extraordinary in The Common.