Before they arrived, summer lived outside my window. I could see it, but I couldn't feel it. Even when I cut the grass, even when I walked barefoot early in the morning, even when I unleashed Molly and let her race down the path and across the football field, even as I raced with her, grass and woods and sky our only companions, summer didn't touch…
Read MoreIt 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."
Read Morehe wouldn't let them into her house. She stood on her dilapidated porch, in the middle of a well-kept neighborhood, her back to the door and insisted that she was fine, that they could go, and that she was going nowhere.
She was 82. She lived alone on the first floor…
Read MoreXena turns 10 today. If there is a perfect age, it is 10. Ten is still a child, but not a little one like 8 and 9. Ten doesn't have to be watched or coddled. Ten is self-sufficient. Ten is, after all, double digits.
But 10 is still a bit too young for heavy-duty responsibility. So 10 doesn't have to wash dishes or change sheets or babysit…
Read MoreShe 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.
Read MoreI have never called her “Mother.” She isn't my mother. She's my mother-in-law.
Such an awkward, stiff word, as if the law is binding us, as if the vows her son and I took nearly three decades ago are our sole connection.
We had nothing in common when we met
Read MoreIt's different this year. There's no school schedule to keep me on track, so I find myself bumping into holidays. First it was Valentine's Day that caught me by surprise. Then it was St. Patrick's Day. Now it's Easter. How did it get to be…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreIt's not that I haven't asked for signs before. I have. When I was a kid, signs were my religion. "If the light doesn't turn red before I get to it and if it continues to stay green for as long as I can see it in the rear view mirror, then John White will call someday," I used to say out loud in the car all by myself when I was young and obsessed with John White…
Read MoreHe 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.
Read MoreI told her it was the cold-winter-post-Christmas partums. "That's why you can't get out of bed in the morning. It's January. Nobody wants to get out of bed." But Rose said she had never before had a January like this…
Read MoreShe 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…
Read MoreWhen 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…
Read MoreIt 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.
Read Morehere 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…
Read MoreWaiting. 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…
Read MoreI 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."
Read MoreORLANDO, 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.
Read MoreShe had thin, blond hair that curled slightly on the ends where it just covered her neck, and blue eyes that were a little too close, and a tiny pug nose, and she was sucking on a binky, and clinging to a white teddy bear. The sight of her in the dim light at church took my breath away. She looked, at that moment, so much like my youngest daughter…
Read MoreMy 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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