My dad said Mother’s Day was a conspiracy started by Hallmark to sell greeting cards. Perhaps this was the beginning of my dicey relationship with Mother’s Day. Not to mention my mother’s feelings about it. Mother’s Day is different when you’re a young mom than from when you’re a grandma. And when you’re dealing with […]
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I woke up from a nap on my chaise lounge during an uneventful day off which included reading parts of books by such luminaries as Joan Didion, Steven Kotler, Allissa Wilkinson. I opened my eyes and looked out the plate glass window into the garden. Then I realized, with a strange reflective focus, that my
People who wanted to write books Read More »
Yoga with goats? How does that make sense? I went to goat yoga this week because I’d always wanted to. And I can explain, it just takes a minute…. First of all, let’s remember that the word “yoga” means “linkage” between mind and body, two things that don’t always go together. The linking of goats
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Do women still wear pantyhose? In short, yes, but not as often as they used to. If you are wondering about this question, most likely you were raised in that era in which it was believed just about indecent to go out without pantyhose. If you were wearing a skirt, and no hose, you were
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The idea came from my daughter who’s in the Marines. She’s stationed in Japan and when I said I would come visit her this summer, she said “of course we’ll want to climb Mount Fuji.” I am an avid hiker but the idea of climbing up the side of this particular Japanese volcano hadn’t
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“Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them.” — Horne Fisher, the sleuth of The Man Who Knew Too Much These are mystery stories, eight of them, deeply immersed in the world of Edwardian England. The stories are atmospheric. They present between the lines a picture
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To begin with: all right, I admit it. I was turning 60 and felt depressed. This is not something you like to talk about: depression or turning 60. After all, the trigger for this discouragement, the turning 60, it’s pretty unchangeable. Never mind all that talk about age is just a number. Age may be
My copy of How To Stop Worrying and Start Living is quite old now. The printing date is 1984. I can’t remember who gave it to me or if I bought it myself. But when you look at the outlined pages of my copy one thing is clear. As a young woman, I went through
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It’s only been a couple of years now since I passed beyond the idea that growing a profitable garden was simple. I was that person who, when it starts to get warm in the spring, would go out and dig up the garden bed with a shovel and then put some seeds in there and
Growing a Profitable Garden in 2026 Read More »
Mondo dismo: Noun. Definition: A man who is not to be trusted. To women in particular, a self-centered exploiter. Mondo Dismo is an expression that I first heard of in Romancing the Stone, the 1983 adventure/romance starring Katherine Turner and Michael Douglas The premise is that a homebody romance writer, Joan Wilder, finds herself suddenly
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