Their courage is breathtaking

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Their courage is breathtaking

Somewhere, on an old home movie, still on a reel, are seconds of Amy doing cartwheels in my garage. The film is dark, so her face is hidden. But you can see clearly her small, thin body, her short, straight hair and her dark-rimmed glasses, which, even when she wasn't doing cartwheels, were always slipping down her face. Amy did cartwheels the way she did everything, as if she had to do as many as she could, while she could. As if she knew she had to set records in record time…

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A fellow traveler by chance enhances train ride of life

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A fellow traveler by chance enhances train ride of life

If life is a train ride, with all of us on our own, each in individual cars, bumping and chugging and sometimes careening down the tracks, then my time with Wilmha was a series of quick but welcome visits that happened many miles and many years ago. We were in the middle of our ride when we met, the theoretical middle, miles of life already lived and, barring cataclysm, miles more to go.

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Parent's age is measured not in years, but in memories

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Parent's age is measured not in years, but in memories

My father was sick last week. The heat ambushed him. He has never been able to tolerate heat. He blames the malaria he had in the war for this. Before Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower marched him through Africa, he was fine, he says. After the war, he wasn't. The heat, since, has always slowed him down.

But it has never stopped him before.

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He's Mr. Right - really he is

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He's Mr. Right - really he is

Of course he was telling me a better way to prune the rose bush. That's what he does. He's Mr. I Have a Better Way of Doing Everything, a man with vision, practical in his assessments and, as he likes to remind me, always on target with his recommendations. "Just get a saw and get rid of the whole bush," he said last Sunday afternoon as I belatedly attempted to tend to a wild mass of dead wood and thorns that I hadn't bothered to look at all year. I had killed my rose bush with inattention and was now determined to bring it back to life with a little pruning, a little Miracle Grow and a lot of love…

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Mary was everyone's nice aunt

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Mary was everyone's nice aunt

Aunt Mary wasn't my aunt. But that's what I called her. That's what most everyone who met her through her nephew, George, called her.

"This is my Aunt Mary," he'd say. And the name stuck, for it was a perfect fit for a woman who was like a favorite aunt - the one who always likes what you're wearing and praises your food and admires what you've done to your house and tells you you have nice children, even on days when they're not being so nice.

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