Yup, it's a tunnel of light but not that kind of tunnel of light "How are we? How do we think we are? We are just waiting to die," Nanny (my grandmother) would tell me when I asked how she and Papa (my grandfather) were. Never mind that they were in their early 60s (and would live 20+ more years). Immigrants from Poland, they had been through everything from pogroms to losing their young child child to discovering all of their family in Poland were killed in the Holocaust whi

"It's either an ocular melanoma or a brain tumor," the doctor told me five years ago. Ken, my brother Ravi, and I all gasped in unison....

I don't mean this metaphorically. I flirt with real dogs everywhere who, as I mosey on toward my mid-60s, turn out to be so much better...

The weather, for instance: it’s everything lovely at once, then the opposite. I know yet again after looking at the forecast for highs in...

“I’m not going to leave a message,” my sister Lauren said when she left a message Friday. I was standing in the corner of an ebullient...

There’s something both stark and magical about the time right before the holiday season opens wide and emcompasses us in a whole lot of...

Twenty years ago it happened. Ten years ago I wrote this post. So much of it is still true, and there’s so much more to say about the...

Kansas roses struggle once summer gets its heat on, but I have found a land where everything is coming up roses: the Pacific Northwest....

All my life, I heard the old folk song “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” as “Go Tell Aunt Rhoda,” and since I had an Aunt Rhoda, this seemed very...

Sunday evening, we sat on our back deck around an outdoor table and a wedding gift from Aunt Wilma and Uncle Ron 36-plus years ago, a...

Eighteen years ago, we almost lost our youngest son Forest in a car accident involving black ice, three kids and me in a van, and the...

After crowd-sourcing some of the details for this poem from her children (including my husband), here’s what I wrote for the woman who...

I had no idea how how much unconditional love I was capable, and before becoming a mother, I only had a glance of this light I’ve now...

We sat at a small table in La Prima Tassa on a spring day filtering sunshine across our table, sipping tea and updating each other on our...

It started with gerunds, a grammatical term for verbs that end in “ing.” To write directly and precisely, writers are supposed to avoid...

Why I didn’t see a rainbow until I was 12 was because I wasn’t looking, not having imagined rainbows were possible in real life. Growing...

We were exhausted and exuberant when we brought Daniel home from the hospital intensive care following some complications in his birthing...

In the two-plus years since our dear friend Jerry died, I’ve occasionally resumed my search for my Ipod mini, a little music player I...

The day after Christmas is a clearing and arrival at once on the other side of what too often has felt like a great divide for me (check...

I’ve come across this bracelet before, like a treasure lost in a pond that comes ashore haphazardly, and put it away again as a relic of...