In Tune with Our Better Selves

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They make the most compelling photos. A firefighter rushing into a burning building. A passer-by pulling a stranger from a hissing car. An unidentified someone risking life and limb to rescue a cat from a tree or a dog from a patch of ice. There was Officer Russell Cera crawling across a half-frozen river in Racine, Wisc., Tuesday, and the breadth of his effort was so clear that the photograph made national news. We eat up these snapshots of heroes in our midst. Didn't we all believe and imagine, until a feeding pond came up empty, that a Bridgewater farmer…

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Spare yourself some change

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Spare yourself some change

It's strange what your brain decides to remember, what it puts in first place and shuffles to the head of the class. It's not rule-bound like a teacher. The brain doesn't select the smartest or the best looking or even the cleverest memory to take out of mothballs. It's almost as if it reaches into a grab bag of life and pulls out whatever it finds. A snippet of conversation here. A splice of an afternoon there.

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They're Good for Goodness' Sake

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They're Good for Goodness' Sake

The box arrived last week when my husband and I were in Canada. My neighbor, Al, brought it in and left it on the kitchen table. He does this. He brings in the mail and the papers, takes care of the dog, leaves the front light burning when he knows we're coming home and Katherine, his wife, waters my plants, and offers me tea, no matter what time it is when I knock on her door. How did I get these wonderful neighbors? How is it that…

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Evalyn has the gift to give

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Evalyn had her bone-marrow transplant a month ago. The words take a single breath. One exhale and they're said. Even their meaning fails to hint at all a transplant entails. The word is ordinary. Transplant evokes an ivy grown too big for its pot, upended and plunked down in a bigger, prettier container; or a sprawling bush dug up from the front yard and moved to the back. Transplants are a part of gardening. A little sun, a lot of water and transplanted things grow sturdier. Even a human transplant is just a person raised in one place who now lives in another.

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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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