A LIFE IS LOST TRAGICALLY, BUT A FAMILY'S LOVE ENDURES

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There's a dogwood tree in her front yard in Randolph. "It's my Mama's tree," says Michaela, who is 6. "It has all the things my Mama loved. See?" Surrounding it are flowers and in it are Beanie Babies and under it is an engraved stone that reads, simply, Christine. Michaela doesn't remember her mother. She was a baby, just 16 months old, when Christine died. But she talks about her every day. And she prays to her every night. Last week she asked her grandparents who are raising her, "Do you think Mama would be happy with me?"

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FEARING THE BAD WHEN LIFE IS GOOD

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FEARING THE BAD WHEN LIFE IS GOOD

You try to teach them the eternals, that life is good, and people are kind, and nothing is so bad that you can't get through it. And most days you believe this. But then you replay history, or you watch the news, or you pick up a paper and see the face of yet another person maimed, killed, robbed, blown up, beaten, kidnapped, raped, sick and dying, and you think you're selling your kids a pack of lies.

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DAD GAVE ME THE KEYS TO LIFE

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DAD GAVE ME THE KEYS TO LIFE

My father was not overtly, nor even subtly, religious . He hardly ever went to church and I didn't have a sense that he prayed, though at the end of his life he told me that St. Jude was his good buddy. I imagine, though, that he talked to St. Jude in the way he talked to me, not often couching his requests with "please" and "if possible," but stating them directly and firmly as in, "I need you to do this for me." At the end of his life he handed me a crucifix, which he said he carried with him throughout the Second World War.

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IN DUE TIME, BIG BOY PANTS WILL WIN

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IN DUE TIME, BIG BOY PANTS WILL WIN

With the puppy, it was simply a matter of carrying her outside, plunking her on the grass, and letting her do her thing. She was 6 weeks old when we got her and was house-trained in a few weeks. No "how-to" books. No "Ten steps to housebreaking your pooch." And absolutely no guilt that she was too young to introduce to the backyard, or that our approach might cause her irreparable psychological harm.

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WE'RE HOPING ALL OUR FEARS ARE WRONG

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WE'RE HOPING ALL OUR FEARS ARE WRONG

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.

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FIND YOURSELF BY LOOKING INSIDE

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I 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.

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I Was the Sun and the Kids Were My Planets

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I Was the Sun and the Kids Were My Planets

wasn'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…

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THEIR HOUSE WAS NOT A HEALTHY HOME

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THEIR HOUSE WAS NOT A HEALTHY HOME

Everything 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.

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LIFE AND DEATH ENCOUNTER WITH A BIRD

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LIFE AND DEATH ENCOUNTER WITH A BIRD

My 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.

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RABBIT LOVER NOW THE RABBIT HUNTER

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RABBIT LOVER NOW THE RABBIT HUNTER

I 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…

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NOT SHINY, HAPPY PEOPLE

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NOT SHINY, HAPPY PEOPLE

She 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?

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CELEBRATING TODAY'S DO-IT-ALL DAD

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CELEBRATING TODAY'S DO-IT-ALL DAD

We 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.

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ALONE WITH MOTHER'S MEMORY

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ALONE WITH MOTHER'S MEMORY

I 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.

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A RWANDAN SURVIVOR'S TALE OF FORGIVENESS

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A RWANDAN SURVIVOR'S TALE OF FORGIVENESS

It 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.

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