In which I discuss places around this place we call home, in various stages of undress.
Since I was diagnosed with depression decades ago (age 15), I have had some time to discover a few things that do help me. Some of those things are the usual sort of things: going for walks, taking medication, having a good support system, knowing that my diagnosis is a medical one — that I’m…
Kids. Boy we sure do love ’em. Even people who don’t actually like kids I bet would be pretty quick to acknowledge that kids — although sometimes a pain — are love machines. They make it. They reflect it. They live it. They embody it. They are our teachers in it. So we love the…
If I had chosen a word for the year in 2018, it would have been the word “move”. As in, after 11 years, I finally made a MOVE again– BIG TIME, half way across the country, packing up a four bedroom house and a family and a life — and this time back to a…
If I left somewhat suddenly (after 11 years) or you were surprised, then I think maybe you weren’t paying attention. Every time I think I’m home, something changes my mind. Maybe it’s the porch or its the lack of the porch. Maybe it’s the wide open spaces, or the bats and the trees. There were…
Adoptive kids have a special layer of wonder in their lives. Why am I in this family? How did this happen to me? Who am I really? What might have been? This special layer of wonder undoubtedly will shape them and their life direction, as all mental efforts do. But as I worry this thread a…
(This post is a part of the #reverb16… what’s that? Check it out!) The prompt for today’s #reverb16 calls for me to channel the warmth of the tropics (despite our New England locale). Prompt #6: Sunny Surprises. Most of North America starts to get frosty and cold this time of year. If you had an unusually warm…
Here is the look of the Midwest in a summer storm. To me, this landscape is not only the most familiar, it is the most comforting. How can a sky look so forbidding — so menacing and beautiful — but we are not allowed to do so? I was 14 and in my first year…
Ten years ago I lived on Delaware Road in London. Colin had gotten himself half-addicted to internet poker (mostly because he understood the algorithms) and I, in an attempt to connect with him in on his online poker island, suggested writing a couple’s poker blog. It was adorable… called “Poker Sweet Home: Married to the Flop”. It…
It’s all too easy to put off loving where we are until everything is perfect. What can you love about where you are now? Blergh. If I were a weather man, that’s how I would describe the weather today. Cold, damp, rainy, grey. It’s all about the view. I look out my window and what…
What can you say right now with certainty? This I can say for certain. “All the time that you have left is in your hand, right now.” How this plays out is: if you want to talk to your mom, and say you have some idea making a video of her sage advice or just a…
All of life is a thing marked and used.This is the island where my mother is still living. There is not a great deal of the “normal” here. We are just a bunch of hangers on. For those of us here, we are eating off the breadcrumb trail from whence we came. There is a lot…
After the doctor broke the news to my mom and dad and me that mom would die soon, I held onto the 15 cent spiral notebook like it was a life raft. There isn’t enough time to ask and get answers to the really big questions in life before life says “I’m outta here.” It…
Two flights, five burgers at the Atlanta TGI Friday’s airport location. A bag of gummy Lifesavers, and of course, the real lifesavers: four headsets, an iPad and two iPhones with digital movies. One hour’s drive, and we are home. By home, I mean. HOME. Not Iowa, the place I grew up. I mean: here. Connecticut.…
Is it worth being sentimental over one tree? The last time I mentioned to friends that we might have to cut down our two huge Norway maples, one FB friend replied “good riddance. They are invasive species to New England anyway.” I sometimes think that our attachments to trees or cars or other “stuff” isn’t…
My memory of my youth is a haze of fine particulate.I don’t remember what I did in the summer as a kid. Not specifically. I remember that I played outside with the neighbor kids and my siblings. We rode bikes and ran around. I went on vacation with my family. There was the library and…
