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 …
The school’s empty staff room seemed a perfect place to lull a baby to sleep. I sat in a big old armchair, my tiny grandson resting on my lap. In the gym down the hall his parents and their fellow cast members rehearsed for the upcoming community musical. Fragments of …
