With Christmas bearing down on us like a train jumping the tracks, I had to limit myself to three stories a day. The tone of each tale is solemn, grim, evocative of so many depressingly ordinary things in our lives as we age. As a woman in the seventh decade of life, five years o...
So in order to help you survive the upcoming holiday (and possibly eternity) I have created a list of “Things you definitely shouldn’t have in your bed.” Cigarettes/cigars/joints (AKA anything that can spark a fire) Starting on a serious note; I don’t know if spontaneous combustio...
Two years later and now living in a different area in Georgia, I not only still missed Hanna terribly but I also missed that wonderful feeling of having a dog in my life. I was ready to adopt a new one. My husband on the other hand, considered Hanna to be the very best (as she ...
Find a pumpkin.A critical first step. Pumpkins must be the hollow kind – beware pumpkin-shaped squash that are solid all the way through. If you get one of those, the best you can do is draw a face on them (trust me, I’ve tried to hollow them out and cut them, it 100% does...
Also ask farms and horse stables if you can take a load of free manure (if you have a truck available). You may be able to get wood chip mulch from arborists or wire maintenance crews trimming trees on a city street. In the fall, we like to drive around in the truck and snag bag...
Sunday eventually catches up and then surpasses me, and the trail is mostly uneventful until I reach Country Road, the last road crossing in Vermont. There’s a guy with a pickup truck there, and he’s giving out trail magic! I eat a hot dog and have a pop while I stand and talk...
“The latch key is always out,” reminding us how welcome we were. I can picture him saying those things while sitting in the big comfy chair that he’d made room for in their kitchen, toothpicks in his pocket, the newspaper on his lap, a cup of coffee if it was morning, tea if...
I couldn’t say “no” to a velvish fluff-ball on which I imagined many hours of book-reading would be spent. (I selectively forgot at the time that kids have smartphones now and books are just obsolete ipads in their eyes.) As you can imagine, this underused item has been a bit...
“I knew he had crossed the line to where I could have used deadly force, but I just felt that, you know, just because you can take a life, it doesn’t mean you should.”– New Richmond, Ohio Police Officer Jesse Kidder Recently, we have seen an uptick in the reporting of deaths...
I realized at that moment that my therapist was right. We need to do everything we can to infuse our lives with as much joy as we can. So, I pulled a blanket from the basket and hardly had to tap twice on the seat next to me before Trudy bounded up and settled right in against...