Most great accomplishments, they say, happen because somebody, somewhere along the line, became angry enough to do something about what made them indignant. But like other explosives, anger requires careful handling and expert managing. Sometimes that means simply shutting up. “I always knew when you were mad,” my daughter Amanda …
“They’ll need a miracle to survive,” I thought that spring day, while struggling to plant my bedding plants. “Oh, I’ll need potting soil too,” I had told the nursery cashier on the day I’d made my final plant purchase – flowers mostly, and a few herbs. “The dirt in my …
My 93 year-old father says he visits with his twin brother,, Dave, regularly in the woodshop. I picture them there, alike as two halves of a walnut. Surrounded by their projects, chatting and laughing over the buzz of saws, breathing in the sweet fragrance of sawdust and stopping often to clean …
I’ll call my ninety-three year old dad on Father’s Day. He’ll call me “Sweetheart” and tell me how much he loves me. And once again, he’ll cry and thank me for making the time. “I love talking to you, Dad,” I say. And I do. I try to call every …
Ladybean Tabatha turned our calendar pages from May to June on the day I’m writing this. It arrived so fast. One day I noticed the first robin shivering on the grass, then a batch of newly hatched tent caterpillars on the flowering plum, and after that, barely-there buds on the …
I had made the children rag dolls that year. Clown-faced Toby for our son, flaxen-haired Miranda for our daughter. In the very early eighties, the floppy toys became my hand-stitched rebellion against the creeping Cabbage Patch craze. The Patch kids cost thirty bucks to adopt. I’d used remnants and cut apart …
At four or five years of age, Dinah Jane made a proclamation. “Nana,” she said, “ONE day, when you get LITTLE and I get BIG, I’m going to push you around in your wheelchair.” I didn’t mark the proclamation day on the calendar, but it may have been the day …
When I returned from my 95 year old mother’s funeral, two provinces over, I brought an entire suitcase of memories with me; passed on by my older sister who bore the burden of the major sorting of our parent’s possessions. At home, the case sat untouched for weeks. On the …
Something happens on one’s inside when the season of grandparenting arrives. (Something happens on one’s outside too, but that’s a subject for another column.) In the classic children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, a stuffed toy rabbit, who had observed real live rabbits playing in the garden, asks a …
Every marriage, even a long-established partnership like ours, needs small habits to help keep the wheels attached. Speaking kindly. Laughing together. A hug for no reason. A handclasp in the dark. Notes on the pillow. Calls or texts to touch base. Unexpected gifts. Silly rituals, like a hip bump every …
