Summer: It's a state of mind

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Summer: It's a state of mind

It will take work this year. It won't come automatically. The temperature is too cool and the mood too hot. The world, always unsafe, feels even more so. Bad news stalks us, and there's no place to hide. "The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless and hot."

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A place of her own - at last

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A place of her own - at last

She moved out the way she was born, in the midst of a crisis that overshadowed her. So her leaving was hardly noticed. She left home amid, "What's the prognosis on Gram?" and phone calls and tears.

She slipped into the world pretty much the same way. Then it was her other grandmother who was fighting for her life. She was born quickly, as if she knew there were other things to be done. We have pictures of her older brother and younger sister at their births. But there is not a single photograph of her.

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Al Washes His Car, Spring Nears

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I walk cross the street to chide Al about washing his car on the first nice day in months.

"What," he says, "you've never seen me out here in the cold? You never saw me in my rubber gloves? I've been doing this all winter long. Where've you been?”

I must have been in the kitchen still sipping coffee or upstairs getting dressed. He must have done all his rubbing and scrubbing long before dawn because I totally missed him in his rubber gloves. But there is no missing him this day. He is in his…

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Ah, to be young and oh so sure

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Ah, to be young and oh so sure

He didn't exactly swagger into the house. He walked the way he always does. Only he walked with confidence.

He didn't hunch through a doorway. He didn't slouch in a chair. He sat like a capital "L" perfectly straight, not crossing and uncrossing his arms, not shuffling his feet, not looking like a corralled horse eager to bolt.

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Gifts Crafted with Love Do Last

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She made three scarves, one for each of us. Lauren's is white with silver and blue sparkles, Julie's is light purple and mine is dark purple and green. They're not the long, thick variety you can wrap around your neck two or three times and still have enough left over for a flowing tail. They're not fancy scarves, either - no cable stitches or popcorn knots or intricate sewn embroidery on any of them. They are just rectangles of soft yarn knitted…

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Adults need to remember when snow was wonderful

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Adults need to remember when snow was wonderful

When my kids were little, I used to notice these things: The way the sky in winter looks as if you could skate on it; the way the evergreens, laden with snow, look like they belong next to a gingerbread house; the way the world looks when the snow stops and the sun comes out and everything seems fresh and newborn…

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Drunk driver claims a victim

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It is snowing and I am late, the traffic on Route 138 backed up for miles. When I arrive at New England Sinai Hospital, Laurie Kelly is gone because the traffic will make her late if she waits for me. She cannot be late. She has driven all the way from Monument Beach to Stoughton with her 6-year-old daughter so that the child can see with her own eyes that her father is still in the same room, in the same hospital bed, where he was yesterday, and the day before yesterday and dozens of days before that.

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Christmas Lingering This Year

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here are 12 days of Christmas, Father Coen says every year.

And every year I sit in church and hear the words and dismiss them, certain that while in theory this may be true, in fact if everything isn't done by Christmas Day, the season will be ruined.

This year, everything wasn't done. I hardly did any shopping, never bought even one stocking stuffer, never sent Christmas cards or made a gingerbread house…

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Wee steps and slow

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Waiting. That's what we've been doing. Waiting for the drugs to work, for the infection to abate, for the pain to go away, for the snow to fall, for Christmas to come. Waiting. That's what we continue to do. Monday we heard the forecast: a major winter storm. Monday we heard another forecast: my mother-in-law’s foot has to be amputated.. Silence then, and terror, too. Not the artificial kind buoyed by hysterical newscasters who caution people to bottle water and stock up on batteries because of some potential danger. Butl terror fueled by the inevitable…

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The real miracle of Christmas

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The real miracle of Christmas

I walk down the cellar stairs and dig through boxes, unlabeled, packed in haste, the creche wrapped among Christmas glasses rimmed in green, and find the Santa Clauses, finally. The musical ones I wind up. Two play "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," but my favorite, a ceramic St. Nick with kind, blue eyes, plays "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," and I sing along to the thin, tinny notes. "Have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the yuletide bright. Next year all our troubles will be out of sight."

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It's too late to say thank you

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It's too late to say thank you

ORLANDO, Fla. - We met Tuesday in the hotel lobby on our way to somewhere else. It took a minute for me to match a name with his face because I hadn't seen him in a couple of years and then we were in another city in another hotel lobby. He was smiling, extending his hand, saying his name and when he did, I thought: of course. And it all came back then, the details of our last conversation.

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Memory: Where all is safe

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Memory: Where all is safe

My friend Anne e-mails me an excerpt from "Listening to Your Life," a book of daily meditations by Frederick Buechner. I find it on my computer at 5 a.m.

It is dark. The house is quiet, and I feel a little like the shoemaker in the old children's tale. I tiptoe downstairs to find that someone has been working while I've been sleeping, a pair of shoes on the workbench already made. An idea on the computer, already hatched.

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Turning 85 is a present for all those who love her

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When she was 80, we bought her 80 presents. It took a while to find 80 things that an 80-year-old didn't already have and could eventually use, but we did. We bought shortbread and jelly and notepaper and stamps and dusting powder and assorted teas, and wrapped all the gifts in silver foil and tied them with white bows then placed them in and around a pink hatbox. The presents, by their sheer number, made 80 look inviting. My mother-in-law, surrounded by family and friends, sat in the living room and talked and laughed as she unwrapped each present…

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