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…
Our new house is right around the corner from our town’s middle school, which is so close I’d be ashamed to have someone see me get in my car to drive there. Our old house was pretty close too, but now instead of crossing a busy county road and cutting through a town parking lotRead more…
My mother-in-law was a lot of things, but fancy wasn’t one of them. And even though in the end she would wind up living on a golf course in Florida and belonged to one of the swankier beach clubs on the Jersey Shore, she stayed pretty true to her humble Pennsylvania roots. She saved rubberRead more…
At least once a day this summer, I will notice a woman of a certain age out of the corner of my eye and think, just for a moment, that it’s my former mother-in-law. Maybe it’s the color of the woman’s hair as she moves briskly through the parking lot of our local farm market.Read more…
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but around here people tend to stick around. They buy a house, raise a family, send their children off into the world and then, quite often, the kids come back to buy their own house nearby and raise a family of their own and begin theRead more…
My siblings and I – especially two of my sisters – look a lot alike. Most of us have brownish hair, Hazel eyes and pretty bushy eyebrows that, if left untended, would grow up into our hairlines. And, other than the oldest of my brothers, we are not the tallest people on the planet. So naturally,Read more…