Sometimes, I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I don't know why. I have not been asleep for 20 years. I did not wake up this morning to a universe I no longer recognize. I recognize every little thing. Still, it surprises me how you can live every day with your eyes wide open and not see change as it is happening.The big changes? They don't blindside you. They come with headlines. Wars and deaths and politics and shootings and Cuba and Greece and Donald Trump. We see them coming. But lifestyle changes…

All I have are two stories. My mother told me one many years ago, and my father's brother told me the other in 2005 shortly after my father died. My father told me nothing. His entire life, he refused to talk about the war. The first story my mother shared when I was 10. I'd discovered an old cigar box full of letters…

Apparently I was saying "no" too much. "No, thank you." "No, not today." "No, I'm sorry. I can't." Which is why my daughter Julie began talking to me about the power of yes. Saying "yes," she explained with a serious expression and her hand on my shoulder, had led her to people, places, and experiences she might not have had if she had let distance, weather, and an "It's too late and I'm too tired" mindset keep her in her comfort zone…

There's no way to slow down time, to change the pace of the here and now and have this finally lush, incredibly beautiful spring linger. I know this. But winter was so long, not because time did the impossible and actually inched to a crawl, but because we did. Heavy coats, boots, hats, gloves, snow, sleet, wind, cold, inertia — they weighed us down and they slowed us down, too.Frozen. That's what we were for months…

I wish time were physical, something you could touch and see, a giant, football-field-sized collage laid out for perusing. Only instead of chronological still shots of your life there were collections of moving pictures. Pause and choose, then step into the past the way Mary Poppins whisked the Banks children out of a drab, London day into a magical, colorful park simply by stepping into a sidewalk painting.

My kids began planning their kids' summer vacation in February. Hand to God. I have the e-mails to prove it. "Let's start with July," my daughter wrote to her brother, sister, father, and me, listing her two children's activities all the way through August. She did this in the middle of the snowiest winter, ever.

Kathy May lives in a split ranch in Scituate, has a husband and three sons, one in college, one in high school, and one in middle school. There's an SUV in her driveway bearing her children's names on decals, a glittering shamrock hanging on her front door, and a medium-sized dog looking out the picture window the day I meet her.

This is what I would do come winter, I promised myself last fall: I would take advantage of every snow day. I would be productive and proactive and not sit around like a slug and sigh and curse the weather and eat everything in sight.

I miss hats. Not the pull-over-your-ears, knitted, ugly wool creations designed solely to keep your head warm, the kind we are all being forced to wear right now. (Note: Despite advertisers' creative claims, there really is no such thing as a "Fashion" Windproof Pullover Cat Ear Warm Knitted Hat Toque.) No, what I miss are the totally superfluous, impractical pillboxes, cloches, and wide-brimmed beauties designed solely for sitting on top of a head and making the wearer look pretty.

He has to prod me to go. It's been this way all of our married life. I've attributed my reluctance to pack up and go anywhere, any time, to genetics. His parents emigrated from Scotland and England. They left all they knew to come to America. My parents moved from Somerville to Randolph and spent the next decade shuttling the mothers they left behind to and from our unfinished Cape for every birthday, holiday, and tiniest celebration. Packing up and leaving home is in my husband's genes. But it isn't in mine.

The 20-month-old lived here for a week in December. The last time he and his family visited was August. Then, Euan, my youngest grandchild, was a brand-new walker, his steps unsteady, and he fell down a lot. But he didn't let falling down get him down.

The Masai of East Africa do not celebrate birthdays. They do not look back at births, at deaths, at last year, at last week, at yesterday. In their culture, there is only now. Our culture, for the past week, has been obsessed with the past year, with what was popular in 2014. What movies were blockbusters, what books were best sellers,