My mother isn’t one for writing-in-books, so I’m tickled that the book she just mailed me has a sentence underlined with a smiley-face. “I believe in crazyass passion.” That’s the line she highlighted in Rinker Buck’s Oregon Trail travelogue, and that says plenty about my mother! She’s a world traveler, kayaker, fly-fisher, river rafter, scuba diver (Nitrox-certified …
The New-Year mark is a time for lists, even for people who aren’t as obsessed with them as I am. In the spirit of “contained chaos” (see yesterday’s list and my underwear drawer) this is a rather random list of “Things About 2016,” as I experienced it… It’s not a comprehensive list of all the “big …
Toots is the teddy bear I’ve had since I was a year old. Well, we’ve always called him a teddy bear, though his actual shape is sort of open to interpretation… He’s had several face-lifts in that time (in fact, he had a whole “body-lift” a couple years ago after a dog got to him and …
Three years ago I took my kids (Elena Grace & Christian, then 9 & 12) up to my parents’ house for Christmas. It was the first time in over a decade that I had been “home” for Christmas, and we resurrected every Christmas tradition I had grown up with. We baked my grandma’s famous vanilla-apricot …
In company with dinosaurs and dodos, we have to list the wait-till-you’re-married man as extinct, do we not? I honestly believed so, at least as it applies to this country and culture… but I’m here to report that the subspecies is not defunct. I met Jon last year. And I married him this February. And then we started our life of …
My mother used to tease that she had found me in a pumpkin patch, and my sister under a cabbage leaf. Secure in our elementary knowledge of biology (and the baby-book photos of her bulging belly) we didn’t think twice about our origin, despite her joke. I used to make a similar wisecrack when my teens …
I dreamed last night that I was back in Safe Haven, the psych-facility where I recently spent ten days, and the dream felt comforting. The place is well named. My cell phone was one of the things I missed most in there—not for calls, but for Google (I hadn’t realized how many things-a-day I look …
