Word: frosts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...democracy depends upon correcting it whenever the powerful slip into that delusion. Napoleon once wrote: "They charge me with the commission of great crimes. Men of my stamp do not commit crimes." Richard Nixon evidently had some such Napoleonic conception of his exemptions. In his interview with David Frost in 1977, Nixon stated his basic mistake: "Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal." If it had no other purpose or consequence, the agony of Watergate would have accomplished something if it succeeded in teaching Richard Nixon a fundamental American civics lesson. On the evidence...
...early winter now. The daytime temperature hovers in the 30s, and at night the frost shades the windows of the few white wooden houses. When the wind doesn't roar, it howls in the rolling hills. Seagulls loop and cry above the harbor. If this were a normal season, there would be the slight scent of peat in the air, and the residents of the settlement would be going about the business of putting the rams out to the ewes. There are late potatoes and winter cabbage in the family vegetable gardens. The sheep dogs would either be working...
...season in itself. First comes a slow drip. Then a tentative trickle. Then the melt begins in earnest: a rush, a gurgle, a cascade. The earth squirts, muck and mire suck at boots, downhill becomes a torrent, uphill becomes a bog. Snowbanks dissolve, flowing over ground already saturated. The frost comes out of the earth, and a normally flat, hard roadbed melts into mud three feet and four feet deep...
Warning signs sprout on trees along the unpaved roads. FROST HEAVES . . . BUMPS . . . CLOSED. Only the foolish travel back roads without chains, winches and, for real safety, four-wheel drive. Brookfield has 76 miles of town road, and only four miles are paved. Citizens who are dissatisfied with the correlation between taxes paid and quality of road surface tend to complain. As a consequence, many road commissioners and some selectmen in Vermont tend to acquire unlisted telephone numbers after about a year of public service...
Here, prices are substantially lower than those for 19th century works, making them ideal entry points for the new collector, but not for jittery investors. Consider these risks: Robert Frost brings 25% less than he did a decade ago, Hemingway is barely holding, and Faulkner is sluggish. On the other hand, Wallace Stevens' rare first volume, Harmonium, $2 when published in 1923, can bring $800. The far more recent works of John Updike, John Cheever and Saul Bellow have done nearly as well. Some sharp collectors bought John Gardner's first novel, The Resurrection (1972), for cut-rate...