As the endless days drift by, who can remember a thing?

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As the endless days drift by, who can remember a thing?

My brain is acting out. It is in high dudgeon. I say “Help,” and it says “No.” I say “Please,” and it slams a door. I put a stick of butter in the microwave to soften and then forget to add it to the blueberry muffins. I decide to take a walk and then walk in and out of my house a half dozen times because I forget first my scarf, then my AirPods, then my phone, my glasses, my mask, a tissue, hand sanitizer. If I didn’t forget so much, if I weren’t always searching for things, my Fitbit would have nothing to record.

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Watching and escaping the world from a favorite chair

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Watching and escaping the world from a favorite chair

The chair was Judy Taylor’s idea. She has one in her bedroom, a big, comfortable chair. It’s where every day she sits for a little while and reads. We were with our husbands on a cruise ship, on vacation. Remember vacations? Lying around reading something compelling? We were both reading “The Couple Next Door,” sipping some sugary drink and thinking about nothing except how great the sun felt and what we were going to eat next. This is exactly what Judy and I were doing — reading and drinking and talking — when the conversation turned to her “reading chair” and how much she loved it. “You need to get one,” she told me.

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Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

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Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

I moved into the house I have lived in for nearly half a century kicking and screaming. Not physically, of course. But in my head I was railing. I did not want to move from the small, two-bedroom ranch that was my husband’s and my first home. I loved everything about that house — the kitchen cabinets we painted yellow a few months before our wedding, the living room with its 1970s green, wall-to-wall carpet (which I loved to vacuum), the family room my Uncle Frank fashioned from our one-car garage when I was newly pregnant and making plans to turn our TV room into a nursery…

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When there’s no way around it, we’ve just got to go through it

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When there’s no way around it, we’ve just got to go through it

“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” is a children’s board book that my friend Anne gave me to read to my first grandchild, Lucy. I read it to her for years. It never captured me. I liked “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” much better. But Lucy liked the repetition of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” and when Adam came along, he liked it, too. “We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! We’re not scared. Uh-uh! Grass! Long wavy grass. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”

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What we will remember about a year we’d just as soon forget

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What we will remember about a year we’d just as soon forget

I am trying to put a spin on it, trying to look back at 2020 and cherry-pick some good things that happened in this god-awful year. There have been good things, right? Babies born. So many babies. I see their pictures on Facebook: Haley’s son, Carter; Ali’s son, Benjamin; Emily’s daughter, Maeve; Meryl’s twin grandsons, Leo and William. In all the pictures the babies are beautiful and everyone looks happy…

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A ‘plethora’ of ‘delectable’ words, and even more love

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A ‘plethora’ of ‘delectable’ words, and even more love

Amy has called me Mimi since the afternoon we met. She was 5 then and though I wasn’t her Mimi, my grandson Adam, who also was 5, called me Mimi so she did, too. I’m still not Amy’s Mimi. Not officially. But unofficially, in our patchwork quilt of a family, I am. I am Mimi and Amy is my granddaughter because she is the daughter of my daughter’s partner, and until the world comes up with better words for what we mean to each other, we’re stuck using words that don’t quite fit. Which is ironic considering that Amy Hylen is a stickler for words.

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When my Aunt Lorraine was young, beautiful, and all mine

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When my Aunt Lorraine was young, beautiful, and all mine

My cousin Darlene sent the photo in a text message. Our cousin Jan had e-mailed it to her. I had never seen it before. It’s a black and white shot of two girls on a beach, young women you’d call them today, but girl is who each was back then, in the early 1950s. Beautiful girls, both of them. One salt, one pepper, the blonde in a black bathing suit, the raven-haired one in white…

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Why isn’t kindness news?

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Why isn’t kindness news?

Every day it gets a little harder to keep the faith. I’m trying. But I’m failing more than succeeding. I live in two separate worlds. The world around me. The world in which I exist every day. My house. My street. All the places I visit. The people I know. The people I see. The people I text and e-mail and talk to. Old friends. New friends. I don’t see hate or division in my very small world.

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By telling their stories, we remember those we have lost

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By telling their stories, we remember those we have lost

I saved his letters, 301 typewritten pages, all single spaced, all caps. “SHAME ON YOU!” the first began. “YOU MADE ME CRY. I’M EIGHTY YEARS OLD AND YOU MADE ME CRY.” Ray Redican wrote this to me on Dec. 24, 1993. On Dec. 26, when it arrived in my mail, I picked up the phone and called him. This is the way our friendship began and the way it endured. He wrote and I called.

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Memories take us back to movies, popcorn, friendship, and family

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Memories take us back to movies, popcorn, friendship, and family

I am escaping the present. I didn’t mean to leave the here and now. But, really, the here and now is not such a fun place to be. So why stay?

I was on Facebook sipping my morning coffee, scrolling through reposted news stories, reading the comments of people I don’t know (Why do I do this?), getting more and more annoyed, a too typical morning, when up popped a post with a slightly blurred photo of the Randolph Movie Theater, the one that was on North Main Street in the 1950s. And just like that, the present was gone and I was at that old theater, the box office right in front of me, my best friend Rosemary beside me…

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The summer of COVID-19 fed my soul, but it broke my heart

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The summer of COVID-19 fed my soul, but it broke my heart

What I will remember about the summer of COVID-19 are pleasures denied. Hugging. Eating out. Visiting friends. Traveling. Singing. Going to concerts and plays. Sports. Crowds. Trains. Planes. Movies. The laughter of strangers. Lunches and dinner parties. All the freedoms that were part of every summer before this one.

But what I will also remember about the summer of COVID-19 are the unexpected pleasures: the clarity of the air, the freshness even on the hottest of days. This summer, Massachusetts’ air has been like Maine air, a just-scrubbed clean that has made not being able to go to Maine almost OK. I will also remember…

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A children’s book reminds us how despair can turn to hope

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A children’s book reminds us how despair can turn to hope

A children’s book has made me feel a little better about all that’s going on in the world right now. Not complacent better, or less interested better. Just better.

Who knows how long I’ll feel this way. A day? A week? Until I foolishly watch World News Tonight, bad things from every corner of the earth, the tragic and trivial, crammed into a 30-minus-8-minutes-for-commercials slot? Until the middle of the night when sleep is impossible and everything bad that ever was, is, or will be kidnaps my brain? Until it’s next month or next year and we’re still in the same mess we are in today, with not just a virus killing us but a virulence that is as deadly…

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Seeking a cure for ‘heart fatigue'

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Seeking a cure for ‘heart fatigue'

“Heart fatigue.” That’s how I read it. But it was “Heat fatigue” a friend had written. On Facebook. Her dog had been overheated so she soaked a bath towel with cold water from a hose and draped it over his back. “He seems to really like that,” she wrote, posting a picture of her dog at peace, eyes closed, ears up, sleeping the sleep of the untroubled. I envied the dog. I looked at the towel and wished there were as simple a solution for heart fatigue…

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With more questions than answers, I wonder who to believe

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With more questions than answers, I wonder who to believe

July arrives this week. July. Impossible. March April May June That’s how long we have spent inside obeying the rules. Having our groceries delivered. Washing doorknobs. Disinfecting counters and floors and packages. Staying 6 feet apart from anyone not under our roof. Staying 6 feet apart even from the people we love…

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A blown kiss kindles memories of the young mother I once was

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A blown kiss kindles memories of the young mother I once was

He’s a toddler and he lives next door and because I have been nowhere for months, I watch him more than I would have pre-COVID. I watch him with wonder the way I watched the trees this spring grow from spindly, gray sticks into the lush, green canopies they are now. Pre-COVID, I wouldn’t have been dazzled by the slow, daily growth of both the trees and the boy. I would have noticed spring in all its beauty, of course. And I would have noticed the toddling boy, too, smiled and waved at him before I got into my car. But my head would have been elsewhere. I’d have been thinking about traffic, and where I was going, and did I have my phone? These things would have been my focus, not the little boy next door…

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Kind, good, caring people can help get us through these times

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Kind, good, caring people can help get us through these times

My friend Elaine is not the only one reaching out and doing what she can to give meaning to these strange and uncertain days. Yesterday, I received a video from Francesca, a woman I’ve known since our kids were in high school plays together. The video was of a Halloween party 25 years ago. I didn’t remember the party and neither did my daughter, but there she was on film with all her theater friends in our kitchen, dressed up as characters they’d played, talking into the camera. Francesca’s son had filmed this…

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