My beloved cousin, John Allen, died too young, not long after his 69th birthday, on April 1, 2020, in Toronto, early in the pandemic. Although he was a distant cousin (our shared ancestor is way back there about five generations), we had felt a strong connection since meeting more than twenty years ago. He reminded me a bit of my [...]

  I have an acquaintance who writes a blog called Snarky Senior. And boy, she has no qualms about being cheeky. It’s pretty entertaining, of course.   I’m not quite as in-your-face as she is, although I used to be when I was younger. But I found I was not attracting a lot of camaraderie with this approach, and although [...]

I had a song running through my head this past week, and realized it was from Camp Fire Girls’ camp, 1957. (I was actually singing it to my old peculiar tortoise shell cat, Leila, who loves being sung to.) I always thought that these were the words: “Ocky tocky oomba, ocky tocky oomba, hey diddle, hi diddle ho diddle ay,” [...]

Those sound like the four horsemen of the apocalypse and their better angel, don’t they?   I live in an area where there are winter days that sometimes don’t get below 57-60 Fahrenheit. We have a pool, which we installed eighteen years ago so that I could dip my post-polio body into it regularly, walk (which is hard for me [...]

Because I was raised in a Christian home, we celebrated all the holidays originated by early or later Christians (some traditions actually co-opted from Pagans, such as the wonder of a bright decorated tree, and celebrating this near the Solstice). Christmas, following my December birthday, is still my favorite. Now that I’m less religious, and married to a wonderful yet [...]

A few months out of the hospital, late 1951 A letter from Daddy My niece died recently, of ALS. Going through things she had saved, I found a scrapbook my mother (her maternal grandmother) had started in the mid-1920’s, with lovely cards given to her by her first husband, my sister’s father. My niece would have said, “My [...]

This past weekend, I spoke at the memorial service for my niece, who died a month ago and was one of my two closest blood relatives. It was good to have a few meals and time with some of the remaining members of my family and her friends, and I also spent several hours combing through various bits of my [...]

Recently I attended a Zoom meeting of one of my two women’s groups. The theme the facilitators chose was “Mothers—the Rose and the Thorn.”  Ah, such an apt metaphor, I thought. We each had the opportunity to express from our hearts how our mothers, most of whom had passed long ago, had both the rose and the thorn in their [...]