In A Pickle
The day it happened, palm trees rustled in the breeze, sounding like spring rain. A great blue heron froze, one foot tucked, waiting to spear breakfast with its beak. My…
I Think You Can
I shoved the bike as hard as I could and let go. As a parent, I was never convinced my life lessons landed with my kids. One cool late September…
Nothing But Net
The ball hit the rim. Stopped. And teetered. A hero would be made — or not — depending on which way it fell. My high school phys ed teacher, Ms.…
Tender Was the Night
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I frequently feel haunted. During our visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Art in fall of 2025, my husband Richard and I were both…
Looking for Gatsby
“You can’t go home again.” The writer Thomas Wolfe believed that if you returned to a place from your past, it wouldn’t be the same. My husband Richard also says…
The All-American
It was a cold, blustery January morning. Icicles draped the parking porte-cochère like holiday lights, frozen mid-melt. A rare recent southern winter storm left lacy ice patches on the dormant…
Crying Time
I wasn’t expecting to learn anything by sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. “It’s such a relief they got all the melanoma,” my friend had said to me after I…
Hometown Hero
Detroit did not come to my mind as a bucket list destination. But it was the perfect starting point for our next trip. My husband Richard was born in the…
Bound to Look Good
My daughter Kristen and I recently went shopping for undergarments. As we walked into Macy’s, I asked the young woman at the perfume counter, “Where do you keep your intimates?”…
Burning Down the House: A Lesson in Generosity and Persistence
In the 1920s, my father’s parents sharecropped land they rented from wealthy landowners in Delaware. My grandmother worked as the cook in the main houses. She was short and strong.…
Finding Christmas
We weren’t prepared for missing Christmas. It was an unseasonably mild December. A wintry mix of sleet and rain started early Christmas Eve morning, turning our yard into ice-crusted soggy…
Waiting for Light
Christmas is coming! On our childhood farm, not unlike hunting season’s opening day, my mother declared the beginning of the Christmas season. It launched with housework. Nestled among over a…
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Finders Keepers
My childhood home was a one-story, white-shingled farmhouse nestled in the middle of corn and soybean fields. Typical of homes built in the early 1900s, it was long on charm and short on space. My mother was a “collector” — frugality impressed upon her as a child of the Great Depression made her save everything. With time, every tiny closet and cranny overflowed. In my and my sisters’ decidedly unsolicited opinions, our parents needed to downsize as they aged. They needed room to maneuver safely. We took turns helping them re-organize, sorting through what to keep and what to let go. This often resulted in a tug of war between…
