Foundations remain constant

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The house I grew up in has changed hands again. I saw the new owner standing in the yard as a friend and I drove past. I do this sometimes, drive by to look and to remember. My father paid $ 10,000 for this house in 1954. The new owner paid $ 280,000. But the house isn't just more expensive. It's changed in many ways. It's bigger. One of the owners built on and up. And because of this, the yard is smaller. The trellis is gone, along with the rose bushes my mother planted and coaxed to grow. And the sprawling, silvery spidery things that lined the front walk have disappeared, as have the shrubs that separated our yard from the neighbor's, my mother's rock garden and the green awnings she scrimped and saved for.

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Halloween Memories of Happy Times

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It’s just a piece of orange felt that was made into a mitten so many years ago its loss should mean nothing now. There were two mittens then, plus a giant, orange, Ernie head.

Ernie, as in Bert and Ernie from “Sesame Street,” was a  Halloween costume I made for my youngest child at least 20 years ago. I don't sew now. I should never have sewed then. I botched everything. I stitched left sleeves into right armholes…

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A mother SHAREs her grief

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Nothing had prepared her for this. Jennifer Johnstone was a healthy 26-year-old, 35 weeks pregnant with her second child, a girl, whom she and her husband Scott had already named Madison. She had ultrasound pictures of Madison too. One showed her so tiny that it was difficult to see her as anything but an outline. In another, Jennifer could almost see her daughter's smile. "This is your baby sister," she'd tell Cameron, now age 3. "Do you want to feel her kick?" she'd ask, taking his hand and guiding it with her own.

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DUI Convict is One Sorry Man

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They wanted an apology. As much as they needed the man who killed Christine Griffiths punished and put away, they needed his remorse, too. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I wish I could take it back." They ached for this. But what they got was a man who refused to even look at them, who kept his head bowed and his eyes lowered as one by one they took the stand and talked about a young woman each of them had loved…

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Wish I could remember what I had to tell you

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Wish I could remember what I had to tell you

"The Dairy Queen has, what do you call those things?" Ron asks his wife of 36 years.

"McFlurries?"

"No. No. It's a 'd' word."

"T? Tiramisu?"

"Not 't,' Maryann! 'D.' " Ron and Maryann are visiting from Alabama. They are in the family room sitting on the couch eating Healthy Choice Coffee Almond Fudge ice cream. The Healthy Choice apparently has triggered memories of a less healthy choice. The subject of the Dairy Queen has come out of nowhere.

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Dog Days Are to be Cherished

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Her paws are more white than black these days, and her muzzle is white and the place on her belly where she loves to be scratched is all white, too. My dog is old.

She sleeps most of the day, waking only to bark at the mailman, to wag and woof at anyone who comes to the door, and to indulge in her favorite pastime, which is, of course, eating. Molly loves food - all food. When I open the refrigerator, no matter if she is half a house away and in a dead sleep, she comes running. At least she tries to run…

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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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Love is natural, but it's hate that's learned

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Love is natural, but it's hate that's learned

While delegates from 57 Muslim nations sit around in Malaysia trying to come up with a definition of terrorism - using human beings as bombs to blow apart civilians is, most of them say, mere freedom fighting - the truth, as usual, gets buried under words. The truth is simple. Life is precious. Life is a gift. Life should be safeguarded, not sacrificed. So why isn't the preservation of human life the subject of the day instead of the ongoing rationalization for yet more murder?

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Growing up, growing together create a lifetime of memories

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Thirty-four years ago my husband and I stood at the altar at St. Bernadette's Church in Randolph and before God and friends promised to love one another until death did us part.

Death was something straight out of the movies back then, drama relegated to the final scene. So were the words: "To have and to hold, from this day forth."

I was 20. The groom was 21. Our favorite song was the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" ("if we were married").

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As we age, we get lost in fog on trips down memory lane

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As we age, we get lost in fog on trips down memory lane

The five of them were talking about a restaurant we had eaten in last year.

"It was across from Pat O'Brien's," one of them said.

"It had all that chrome going on."

"We ate breakfast there two mornings."

"And you got french toast and bacon both times," Maryanne told me.

They remembered but I didn't. It was gone, a restaurant and two mornings.

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