It stalked him his whole life and he ran from it but he couldn't hide. He knew about good and he knew about evil and the legacy of both, long before he knew that a camera could be a weapon and that memory is the best revenge. Roman Polanski was only a boy when his mother, who was four months pregnant, was killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz…
Read MoreThey 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…
Read MoreIt stands out now because it stands alone. Last week, all the houses in the neighborhood where I walk had wreaths on the doors and lights in the windows. Now the lights are gone and the wreaths, if they're there, hang in the dark.
Only one house still has lights in the windows, and on every bush…
Read MoreBeth and I have been walking. Almost every day. Around her neighborhood. Around in a circle. Four loops and we're done.
I used to walk, years ago, because it was the only way I could get anywhere. I walked over to Janet Butler's and we'd walk together to church…
Read MoreIt'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.
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreIn Whistler, British Columbia, where snow is why people come and skiing is what people do, there is no snow. There is only rain and more rain. Day after day of it.
It will snow soon, people say, looking up at a thick, gray sky that is more November than December. There is no bite in the air, only a chill. There…
Read MoreEvalyn 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreHe would say it's a reach because he never believed in these things. And I admit it is a reach. There is no direct connection between Pope John Paul II's announcement Thursday that he has added five more mysteries to the rosary and my friend Father Coen. Except for the connection in my mind….
Read MoreIt’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…
Read MoreNothing 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.
Read MoreThey 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…
Read More"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.
Read MoreHer 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…
Read MoreSomewhere, 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…
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreOf 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…
Read MoreAunt 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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