I am on the phone with Rosemary, my best friend since second grade. I used to talk to her on the old black phone in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. And she used to talk to me on the old black phone that sat on a table to the left of her front door.
"Want to come over?"
"I'll ask my mother."
Fifty-two years. At least a million conversations. This one is hard. They've all been hard since her son, Mark, left for Iraq.
Read MoreI have it upstairs in a box somewhere, a piece of pink, lined paper filled with writing that's straight up and down. The penmanship struck me as exotic when I first saw it because it wasn't the Palmer Method. It was a combination of printing and art, the f's and g's and p's and q's big and bold and gaudy. The words the letters made were bold, too, because they held up a mirror to my life. This is who you are, the lady who penned them said.
Read Morewasn't wrong about their leaving. My husband kept telling me I was. That it wasn't the end of the world when first one child, then another, and then the last packed her bags and left for college. But it was the end of something. "Can you pick me up, Mom?" "What's for dinner?" "What do you think?”
I was the sun, and they were the planets. And there was life on those planets, whirling, nonstop plans and parties and friends coming and going, and ideas and dreams…
Read MoreEverything about the child is beautiful. She has beautiful hair, beautiful eyes (made even more beautiful by silver glitter she wears on the day we meet), a beautiful smile, and a beautiful soul. You can see a child's soul when they're new. "Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here." So says the poem. But as they age? Souls often hide.
Read MoreMy husband said I should put the bird out of its misery. "It will never fly again. Why are you doing this?" The sparrow, small and frail and biblical, got its neck stuck in the crook of a wrought-iron arm that holds a bird feeder, which I bought last week in a small store in New Hampshire. The feeder, the holder, the bag of special seed were purchased from an old New Englander who's been selling bird food and feeders his whole life. My other feeders are markdowns and seconds. But this was the real thing, "Droll Yankees The World's Best Bird Feeders," a Lexus in my world of Fords. Even the seed was a special blend.
Read MoreI used to have a pet rabbit. I had more than one, actually, though not at the same time. The first was named - no surprise here - Thumper, and lived in a hutch my brand new husband built in our backyard. I used to walk Thumper up and down the street on a short leash meant for a poodle. He was our first official now-we-are-a-couple pet (unless you count Irving, the bird) and when I discovered him dead in his cage one afternoon, I screamed so loud my mother-in-law, who lived next door, came running. A few months later, we got Ovaltine. We found him…
Read MoreThis is the first day of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bigelow Sahlin Jr.'s officially blessed life together. Yesterday they were married. Today they are married. Already, one night is gone. Already the world has changed, and my friend's son and his new bride have changed, too, in obvious and in imperceptible ways.
Read MoreShe has a face like a torn scone. That's what my mother-in-law would have said. And then she would have let it go. She was not the type of woman who would have spent even a minute of her time trying to get a permanently dour someone to smile. So why can't I let it go? Why do I think that if I work hard enough, if I try just a little more, I'll find underneath this woman's scowl a hint, a glimmer, of a smile?
Read MoreIt is not the prettiest tree. A big, gangly oak, it blooms late and it blooms slow and every spring it leaves a thick layer of pale green pollen all over the driveway and the cars and the newly washed windows. And I have thought, many times, I wish we had a maple in the front yard instead.
Read MoreWe watch them and are amazed. They are like the Internet and Velcro and DVD players and cellphones, everyday staples that weren't even imagined when we were young. My husband and I gawk. "Unbelievable," he says. "Fascinating," I add. Different, we say, and agree that this time different is, indeed, better. It's a few days before Father's Day, and we are watching our sons-in-law father. We are watching them make lunch, change diapers, read stories, give baths, sing lullabies, tuck their children into bed, clean up, load the dishwasher, and unload the dryer.
Read MoreI thought it was the rain, long days of it. No sunshine. No color. I thought, I'll be fine when the rain stops. But when it stopped, finally, last Monday and the sky brightened for a while, I wasn't fine. It was June 5, my mother's birthday, and though she has been absent from this life for many years, the lack of her felt new, my loss startling, like walking into a familiar room and banging into a glass door.
Read MoreIt is not a beach book. It is not funny like "Marley & Me" or intriguing like "Beach Road" or trendy like all the Whitey Bulger books now suddenly in print. It is, no doubt about it, totally incompatible with summer and sand and sea air laced with Coppertone and flimsy bathing suits and cups full of lemonade. "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" is exactly what you don't want to read on a summer day. Which is why it's not on any summer reading list that I've come across. But here is why it should be.
Read MoreYour whole life, all you hear about is romantic love. It’s the stuff of fairy tales when you’re young, and poetry when you’re older, and six-handkerchief movies, paperback novels, and Lifetime TV, now and forever.
A kiss from a beloved awakens not just a sleeping princess…
Read MoreMaybe I bought the book after Lucy was born, or maybe some well-intentioned someone gave it to me. I don't remember. But here it is, nearly three years later, still next to my bed.Back then, I read it and lots of other books, looking for answers to questions. Lucy, my first grandchild, my oldest daughter's baby, was born with an extra chromosome…
Read MoreI wonder if the old songs were true. If "It Had to Be You" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home to" came straight from the heart. Or were they just sentimentally tweaked to sell? Was love 60 and 70 years ago as tender and innocent as the music made it seem? Or were all the songs “I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again” a lie, truth sacrificed for meter and rhyme?
Read MoreWe play this game, my grandbabies and I. "How old are you?" I ask Lucy and Adam. And they say sometimes, when they want to "2!" And they will hold up their pointer and their middle finger and grin, the pair of them eager and earnest and proud. Then I say, "I'm 59! " And I count, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 . . . all the way to 59. And they gape at me, not because I'm old to them anyone bigger than they are is old but because I can count…
Read MoreIt's not something we talked about, and we talked about everything. But not this. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Our imagined husbands might go off to fight a war someday, we said, and our sons, if we had sons, might someday be called to fight. We were, even as small children, familiar with battle. We'd read the poetry my father had written in combat. We'd watched "The Fighting Sullivans." But we never imagined the kind of war we're mired in now. We never anticipated raising a child and seeing him grown and married and settled, then suddenly unsettled and terrifyingly vulnerable. We never expected that at 35 he'd be called to serve.
Read MoreBLACK HILLS, S.D. - You'd think that we'd know his name. You'd think if a man from Boston, born on Harrison Avenue, orphaned at the age of 1, beaten and abused his whole childhood, grew up and did something great something no one else has ever done we'd have at least heard of him. You'd think that conceiving and working for 35 years on the biggest sculpture in the world, bigger than the pyramids in Egypt, would be a shoo-in to fame.
Read MoreI'm taking a gardening course this spring, not for obvious reasons. Not just because a friend said, "You have to!" (She's seen my garden.) And not just because I want to grow something other than daffodils, which are in bloom now and look lovely but will be gone in days, leaving the round patch of dirt at the top of my driveway bereft for another 11 months…
Read MoreIt wasn’t easy. Not for him. Not for his children. Not for his brother and sister. Not for any of us who loved him. He was needy. He was demanding. He was stubborn and brilliant and frustrating and funny, a pain in the neck, sometimes, and an ache in the heart all the time; a very human, human being locked in a body…
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