When you were little, do you remember peeking through your fingers at the movies? The action would be picking up and you weren't quite sure if you wanted to see it all. So you peeked. You could see just a little bit, which was plenty, and you kept peeking until you got to a better place in the storyline. Peeking for me started the first week of January, when the…
A friend told me of the day her daddy died. She was 4 years old at the time, eating her chicken noodle soup, when she heard the devastating news. She sat over her bowl, tears sliding down her face, landing in her noodles. "Don't cry", she was told. "Don't cry." That lunch happened almost seven decades ago, but her memory is as vivid as ever. Her mom didn't…
I imagine all of us, at one time or another, have squinted into kaleidoscopes. They rank right up there with Slinkys and Silly Putty, am I right? Ahh, someone hand me a newspaper, let me recreate a childhood memory. Back to kaleidoscopes. Simple to operate: we hold the tube in one hand, put our eye to the viewfinder, and twist it with our other hand. First…
I'm starting this note at 3:30 - the time in my day when Jack typically called to say he was on his way home. We'd talk about what he'd built that day, the wood he'd used, how easy or hard it was to work with, how much glue he'd gotten on himself in the process. He'd describe the various procedures he'd followed in constructing a stringer, a horse, or…
I'm having real coffee this morning. Real coffee has always been the first order of business each new day ("decaf coffee" being a contradiction in terms, you see), but in these first weeks of Solo Living, I haven't always managed to pull it off. Earlier this week, for example, I ground the beans, measured the water, and shortly thereafter poured disappointingly hazy brown liquid into…