Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed there seems to be a shortage of lightbulbs in Hollywood?
I was listening to a recent episode of This American Life called “Spark Birds,” which is a concept I had not heard of before yet stumbled across several times over the course of the week.
This past summer, I wrote about a week when we traveled from our home in Atlanta to Hinton, West Virginia, to work on the three-story warehouse Don and I purchased last year, a place we dubbed Old Fuzzy because the 110-year-old building was so covered in vines it appeared to have hair.
It’s always hard when my daughter drives away from our house to head back to hers, four hours away. But this last time, it was even harder, since she wasn’t alone in the car.
Most everyone has experienced a catchy song lyric that gets stuck on repeat, refusing to leave their head. What I’m about to share wasn’t musical at all, yet was like that with me. Firmly stuck.
Country Roads. Take me home. Please.
I’m three days post-op as I write this, my right foot wrapped in so many layers of bandages it looks like I’m wearing a football.
“Thank heaven, for lee-tle gurls. Without them what would lee-tle boys do?” Don sings in an exaggerated French accent — for probably the tenth time already today.
Don and I recently stopped at one of our favorite thrift stores, not far from our home. I was nosing through clothes while he headed a few rows over to look through some old record albums. On his way there, he spotted a woman struggling to get a small piece of furniture onto her cart. Each t…
It wasn’t something I had forgotten, but something I had no cause to recall, until Don and I were relaxing on the couch, watching a YouTube video about people who experienced sleep paralysis, which are episodes where the person awakens, is aware of their surroundings but cannot speak or move…
Shortly before I sat down to write, I was waiting for the washing machine to finish its spin cycle so I could transfer the clothes to the dryer. I was passing the time with a monkey puppet on my right hand, using it to wrestle our squirrel.
When a woman my age drives a truck my truck’s age, people tend to make assumptions that she knows a thing or two about vehicles.
It was a gorgeous spring day and I was headed for home when I got delayed at a particularly long traffic light. As I sat there, I noticed a cluster of men, all wearing professional business attire, waiting for the light to change.
I never expected to become a mother again this far into my fifties, and certainly not to a creature some refer to as a “tree rat,” but Mom I am, at least, in Rudy’s eyes.
After the death of my youngest daughter, Camille, I tried a variety of ways to deal with my grief. I read books and articles on coping with loss, attended counseling through hospice, joined a support group for parents who lost children.
When my daughter was little, the house where we lived had a four-person hot tub that didn’t work and couldn’t be fixed. One day, upon learning company was coming on short notice, I realized the tub was the ideal place—with its large size and heavy lid (and the assumption that such things are…
Despite being a deeply frugal person, I have never been one for making returns. I suspect my aversion ties back to a long-ago incident at the St. Albans Kmart, which left me gun shy.
When I was in my early teens, our family’s old German shepherd, Bonnie Bell von Groaner, reached the point where our parents were talking about having her put to sleep. Bonnie’s hips and back had given out, she was severely diabetic, and an accidental overdose of cortisone had damaged her he…
In my last column, I wrote about my excitement over having a wild bird land on my head. Now, I’ve just come inside from having fed two. One Eastern Phoebe waited on our deck rail while another ate her fill from the palm of my hand. The moment she left, the second took her place, chirping swe…
I was at my computer, struggling over my wording in an email to a friend my age who recently had open heart surgery.
So, um, Don and I--we kind of bought a warehouse.
Like millions of people worldwide, I have embraced the tradition of starting the New Year by setting myself up for certain failure by choosing resolutions I’m unlikely to keep.
