Early this summer I reconnected with a friend I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. We had worked together on a manuscript about his life that was finally scheduled to be published, and I was excited to hear all about it.
It was early June—finally warm in Minnesota—and I was whining about how I had been waking up between 4 and 5 a.m. at least twice a month
Our neighborhood has more wild rabbits than we deserve. Despite the dogs and cats that sneak into our yard every spring and a variety of hawks ever ready to snatch a tasty meal, two or three rabbits usually manage to survive and call our yard home.
Content: land, animals, children’s books . . .
On a sunny day in February of 2017, my partner and I were walking along a busy street in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, when a colorful window display drew us through the door of a large art gallery.
Two years ago, I attended a pandemic-era book club via Zoom. During the discussion with about a dozen thoughtful, articulate readers, one of them proposed a question I still haven’t answered.
The holiday season may be behind us but I can’t afford to forget what I learned as 2022 drew to a close.
I’ve been having a frank conversation with a dear friend who just turned 60–we’ve been noticing the different ways our culture tells us we lose value as we age. How we’ve been reminded all our lives about the benefits of being young and the disadvantages of life once we’ve been around a certain number of years. It’s all baloney, in my opinion, but exposure to these messages over a period of decades does have an effect.
Recently I was putting together a travel wardrobe of lightweight items that might fit into a suitcase smaller than my kitchen table when I remembered the last time I tried to complete a seasonal wardrobe.
It was a few weeks before my partner and I would be driving up north for our annual lake vacation–those fabulous six days in July when our grown children and their five offspring join us at a big house on one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes.