She's dreaming of that perfect Christmas photo card

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My first Christmas card arrived a few days ago. It was still November and there it was, a photo card, no less, perfectly lighted and cropped and addressed and mailed!

I studied it while eating Thanksgiving leftovers. How is it possible that people are this organized?

Last year at Thanksgiving, all my grandchildren were in one place - my house for the long weekend - and I dressed them in brand new, (which means, as yet unstained) matching Christmas pajamas. Then I rounded them up, begged them to sit still, look at the camera and smile.

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After other flowers fade, marigolds seen in a new light

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After other flowers fade, marigolds seen in a new light

They're intrepid little flowers, dancing in the snow, lovely things - these orange and yellow marigolds that I have disparaged my whole life. They are the last to leave the party, a sudden standout because they stand alone.

The violet charm clematis that grew tall and leggy behind them; the blood red dahlias that dazzled beside them; the pinks and the plums and the purples that swayed and sashayed their way through June, July, and August, outshining them every day - did not outlast them. They have all vanished now like Cinderella's coach and gown. The clock struck, and they withered…

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Her `Tammy' still sings true

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I was such a goofy kid that I actually believed that when you grew up, life turned into a musical. I was raised on musicals - Judy Garland, Doris Day, and Gene Kelly singing and dancing on the small TV in our living room, ``The King and I,'' ``Annie Get Your Gun,'' ``South Pacific'' - blaring from a record player when the TV wasn't on.

Music filled our little house. My mother sang. I sang. My father tried to sing.

I thought everyone sang.

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Seen through loving eyes

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My granddaughter Lucy is 6 years old and is part of a class of people that is quietly being eliminated in my country. She has Down syndrome, a genetic condition that frightens so many women that 92 percent of those who learn they are carrying babies with it choose to abort.

Dr. Brian Skotko, a genetics fellow at Children's Hospital, fears this number will rise. Prenatal tests are invasive, carry a risk to the fetus, and are given in the second trimester, so many women choose not to have them. But a simple new and non-invasive blood test, to be given early in a woman's pregnancy, is coming, perhaps as early as next year.

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School shopping never grows old

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Chicago in 1830 was a military post and fur station where wolves prowled the streets at night and only 12 families lived. Just 30 years later, it had grown to a city of 100,000 and hosted the Republican National Convention.

I learned this the other day while listening to a book on tape, ``Team of Rivals'' by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is really all about Abraham Lincoln, but became for me just one more affirmation that change is not endemic to now. Cities grow. Businesses fail. The sand we build our lives on is always shifting. That's life. Nothing stays the same and the world in which we grow up, the world we know, is never the world in which we grow old.

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Happiness is finding magic in the everyday

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We were on vacation at Rock Harbor waiting for the sun to set - my grown children and their young children, all of us way out on a jetty, the sky pink, the night clear, the bugs, for the moment, somewhere else.

A steel band was playing, calypso music; not Old Cape Cod, but it was nice, festive.

The little kids didn't stay still for long, though.

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Book Review: My Sister, Alicia May

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Book Review: My Sister, Alicia May

When Nancy Tupper Ling’s childhood friend gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome, Ling wrote a poem called Our Fragile Emissary. The heartfelt verse quickly landed in e-mail inboxes and on message boards around the world. (You can Google it.) Six years later, Ling wrote a book about the same child, titled My Sister, Alicia May, and what happened next is a tale of fate, serendipity, and maybe something more…

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Doctor keeps dishing out an earful, and loving it

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Doctor keeps dishing out an earful, and loving it

I don't know much about Dr. Reardon, my ear, nose and throat specialist, except that the man is in love with ears. After all the decades he's been looking at them, you'd think he'd be done. Seen one, seen 'em all. Bring on some toes and elbows, please. But every time he walks into the examining room where I sit with my clogged up ear, he is almost whistling, eager to get to his chart and his very realistic ``you can take it apart and move it around'' facsimile of an ear and explain to me how the middle ear is a hollow chamber in the bone of the skull. He is as earnest as a sonnet.

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T-ball is a hit for adults, too

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I took more than 200 pictures last Saturday morning. A few are OK. You take pictures of little kids in baseball uniforms and you're sure to get some decent shots. But not one of them comes close to capturing all that was really happening at Devoll Field in Canton last week.

It was opening day for Little League. T-ball division, the smallest players in town. The field swarmed with them, 5- and 6-year-olds in uniforms, sponsored by some of the town's businesses.

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Emotions illustrated vividly in book about Down syndrome

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Nancy Tupper Ling lives in Walpole. When her childhood friend gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome, Ling wrote the baby a poem, ``Our Fragile Emissary,'' a love song that has been e-mailed around the world.

Six year later, Ling wrote her first children's book about this child, ``My Sister, Alicia May.'' She sent it to a Raynham publisher, Pleasant St. Press. The co-owner, Jean Cochran, a children's book author herself, loved the manuscript, bought it, and then went looking for an illustrator.

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