Relationships
June 16, 2018
Help Has Been Requested
They had left the oncologist’s office. Bad news, again. Each pushed sunglasses onto noses. They blinked, bug-like, in the mid-day, Dallas sun. more >
December 13, 2012
A Gift a Night
Just a week left, now, until the winter solstice, and less than twenty-four hours until kids start coming home from college. Mark and I have had a pretty terrific couple of months in our empty nest.
Highlights of our time together: a day at The Big E (annual regional fair in Springfield, MA) to celebrate Rosh Hashanah; hearing brilliant banjo player Bela Fleck in concert at Berklee School of Music; making new friends at the Indian classical dance recital of the daughter of old friends; and babysitting our two favorite little boys. The humdrum has been terrific, too. We’ve watched TV together, talked over the newspapers at meals, gone out to the Cape for long walks with Amos. Was this what life was like twenty years ago, before we were parents? Maybe it’s even better now.more >
September 23, 2011
Perfect Read for a Newly Empty Nest
It’s been almost two weeks since Mark and I embarked on our empty nesting adventure. My tears have dried. I’m starting to enjoy increased freedom and diminished stress. Fun is being had. A book — a library book, no less — has helped me shift into drive. I checked out non-fiction writer Melissa Fay Greene‘s No Biking in the House without a Helmet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).more >
September 9, 2011
Rolodex
I’ve been cleaning, clearing, re-organizing, re-painting, even redecorating all summer. Re-claiming space with an eye toward living in an empty nest. I have come across scraps of paper from a zillion lives ago, kids’ kindergarten art projects, files from projects left dead by the road. Some of these reconnections have left me with a sense of sadness. Others have brought outright joy. By far the hardest? The Rolodex.more >
April 16, 2010
The Key Is the Peach Snapple
Every Sunday, I can’t wait to read The Boston Globe Magazine‘s column “Dinner with Cupid.” Globe staff set up blind dates from a pool of folks who apply to eat supper with a stranger. The participants get asked a set of questions: if you were stranded on a desert island, what would you want? what was your best date ever? why are you a catch? when are you happiest? The answers to these questions are up top. The blow-by-blow of the actual date follows underneath and ends with a post-mortem. The daters grade their experience.more >
