This fall, after undue pressure — nay, bullying — from a friend, I scheduled my first colonoscopy. I’d recently turned 51, which is apparently the age when we up the magnification on the readers we buy, stop wearing high heels and schedule things like colonoscopies. The first available appointment wasn’t until January, which IRead more…
Preparing for Thanksgiving dinner is like getting ready to go into battle. It’s all about putting together your marching orders, gathering your troops and executing the plan. But weirdly, I kind of like it, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve been doing it for years. The first time I hosted Thanksgiving was about 20 yearsRead more…
Have you ever wondered what happens when your car runs out of gas? Oh good, you’ve come to the right place. As of this weekend, I have run out of gas four times. Don’t you feel good about yourself now? You’re welcome, America. Really, I’d like to blame Sheila, my one-year-old Subaru Outback. She’s doneRead more…
Lately, I’ve discovered that all the hours of therapy I’ve been paying for over the last decade have really started to pay off. Sure, working with a mental health professional on a fairly regular basis has helped me start to sort out complicated feelings I have about all the people in my life. It’s helped meRead more…
If my calculations are correct – and really, feel free to check because I am not known for counting, much less calculating – my youngest child’s last day of 8th grade this week brings our family’s 19 years in our town’s public school system to a close and ends what for me has been aRead more…
My 14yo hastily cleaned out his backpack before school the other morning and after he’d left, I found a neatly folded sheet of loose leaf paper sitting all alone on the kitchen table tucked under a planter. Upon opening it, I discovered a quite impressive pencil rendering of the male anatomy leading me to wonder –Read more…
Dear Boys and Girls, I am going to try to describe something that might be really hard for you to understand, given the world of instant gratification that you’ve grown up in. For most of your sweet young lives, you’ve been able to watch pretty much any movie or TV show that caught your fancy atRead more…
I don’t know about you, but I never really think about my brain. Honestly, I tend to take that organ for granted, much the same way I do all of those other essential body parts I can’t really see. It’s like I accept that in theory they are there, doing whatever it is they’re supposedRead more…
In the weeks leading up to a recent trip I took to London with my four (mostly) grown children, the most common response I got from folks when I told them about our upcoming adventure was, “You’re taking all of them?” “Yes,” I’d tell the nice people, “every bles-sed one of them.” But I wasRead more…
Last weekend I drove through my small town, past the festive lot next to the firehouse filled with rows of Christmas trees for sale and families wandering through, circling this one or that in search of just the right one. I stopped at our fancy local market to pick up the week’s supply of turkeyRead more…