It is early afternoon on a weekday and Katherine and I are leaving the Red Wing in Walpole after enjoying a heaping plate full of fried scallops and clams, which the restaurant cooks to perfection. Katherine, who is 90 and blind…
Read MoreThe names are separated on opposite pages in an old Hallmark datebook, the kind that card stores used to give away. The girls are listed on the left…
Read MoreIt’s late on a Sunday night, almost Monday morning, and I am on my iPad googling Glennon Doyle Melton. My daughter Julie told me to read Melton’s book, “Love Warrior, A Memoir” two years ago. Sunday, I finally got around to it. I read it in a day. And at the end of the day, I wanted more…
Read MoreI'm starting with Jenny Wolicki because she is the reason I began to notice all the good and selfless things that young people do…
Read MoreI wasn't there. Only the parents had tickets. Schools aren't big enough to accommodate all the grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends who would like to be present at an eighth-grade graduation. So we get pictures and…
Read More'Tell me, Dad. Please, tell me about you." That's what I would say to my father if I could sit with him at his kitchen table one more time. I spent so many hours…
Read MoreLebensborn. It means "Fountain of Life" or "Spring of Life," and was a Nazi program designed by the Heinrich Himmler, the head of the German Gestapo and SS, to create a master Aryan race. It's a word that I had to look up…
Read MoreYesterday, bright and early, while still on my first cup of coffee, my daughter Julie forwarded me an article about sponges. "You Should Throw Away Your Germy Kitchen Sponge Immediately," I read along with the cheery fact that…
Read MoreIt survived the winter. I don't know how. Everywhere — across the street, down the street, all over town — bigger trees with longer histories and better pedigrees lay uprooted and dead, felled by ice and wind and cold...
Read MoreI swear I am not snooping. My granddaughter Charlotte leaves her essays open on my computer, and when I log on there they are, big as life, right in front of me. How can I not read them? Her essays, FYI, are not a private diary. They are part of…
Read MoreThey aren't even mine. I inherited them. They came with my husband not on the day we were married but not long after, a set of encyclopedias, which had lived in his bedroom when he was growing up. "Take them," his mother must have said.
Read MoreMostly what I want to do is copy her words. It's how I started out, when I was a teenager, copying the words of the best writers, slowly, in cursive, in a small notebook, hoping that…
Read MoreI'm feeling a little better, but only a little better, because (A) my daughter, who is decades from qualifying for a senior discount, cannot remember the gist of a seminar she attended last week. She came home singing its praises, full of…
Read MoreThe knobs are long gone, so turning on a television isn't quite as easy as it used to be. Charlotte is on the telephone instructing me. She's trying…
Read MoreElizabeth Dawe is a beautiful little girl who doesn't realize how much she's been through, that life's been harder for her than it's been for her siblings and cousins and friends. The soon-to-be 9-year-old — her birthday is Feb. 12 — was born with…
Read More'I'm sorry," my friend Michael said. He wasn't even in the room yet. He had just opened the door and was in mid-step when…
Read MoreI was Beverly Theresa Curtin back then. Twenty years old. A senior at Bridgewater State, the college my father chose for me. I commuted. He bought me…
Read MoreThey have been my surprise silver lining in 2017, Facebook posts from a guy I barely know about a baby I've never met. Words and photos that gripped me from the start, that made me hope and gave me hope, and that continue, every day, to make me smile.
Read MoreIt's a little book called "Yellow Star." Not many words. Written for young adults. I found it at a book sale at Rockport Public Library in October. The cover lassoed me. It's a photo of a small, somber child with cropped brown hair and clear brown eyes wearing a double-breasted pinkish coat trimmed in brown velvet. When I was small, I had a similar coat. It was plaid, but the same style and the same kind of collar. It itched my neck. I wore it the Christmas Day I was 5. I know this because my father dated the photo he took…
Read MoreAll the things I've wanted. Saved for. Had to have. Bought. Loved in my life. Then, one day, abandoned. That's what happens with things. Ginny dolls. Cabbage Patch dolls. Elsa and Anna. All history now, passion turned to indifference, generation after generation after generation.
My first real purchase? I was 12. It was summer. I'd baby-sat for an entire week, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, three kids. I'd earned…
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