“Christmas is coming O, the happy time! Christmas is coming Sing a merry rhyme! Tell me, What is Christmas bringing? Love and joy and gay bells ringing With a golden chime!” Closer to Christmas this is the way I’ll feel. I’ll be all set for my family to celebrate the season together when we [...]
How was your Thanksgiving? I hope you had lots of family around a big table loaded with good things to eat. If your dinner was like ours, you cooked ‘way too much — on purpose. Half the fun of the Thanksgiving feast is the leftovers crammed into next day sandwiches, casseroles and turkey soup. On [...]
Talk’s cheap. As my children can tell you (complete with some serious eye-rolling), that’s one of my favorite sayings — or clichés, if you prefer. Somehow things I observe around the holidays bring these thoughts to mind over and over. For instance, “If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything.” With Thanksgiving coming [...]
ection is over — no more political calls on my cell phone. No more mailers with their messages in four-color process, full-bleed color (that means color from edge to edge — that’s expensive). It was a nasty campaign, full of rhetoric, rumors and recriminations on both sides. I’d like to know who decided making one’s [...]
Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I lived near “big water” — either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. Salt water runs in my blood. I can’t remember a year in which one or two hurricanes didn’t blow through. In season, tropical storms and hurricanes were part of my day-to-day life. [...]
A week ago I attended my granddaughter Kelsey’s Homecoming and Family weekend at Sweet Briar College. Friday, the scenery on the drive to Virginia was beautiful. Just enough fall foliage was still showing color to contrast with the evergreens through the mountains. Since it’s gotten to be traditional to decorate for different holidays throughout the [...]
What makes people visually recognizable as people? Lots of things, really — one of the most basic of which is our structure. And what defines our structure? Why, bones of course. That’s right — “dem bones” are the underpinnings that define “heads and shoulders, knees and toes.” Give or take a couple of limbs, animals [...]
I’m writing with stiff, half-frozen fingers. That’s what happens when Grammie goes to watch a field hockey game — or anything else in which my grandchildren participate — on a 55 degree evening when it’s spitting rain. At middle school age, kids have the metabolism of a steam engine — they simply don’t get cold [...]
