Dear Grandma…

Dear Grandma,
I miss you.  Lately these flashes of memories keep intruding on my day.
Your laugh.  You looked so regal, so classy.  But your laugh was down home, real folk, spilling out of you whenever the smallest opportunity for mirth arose.  How much we laughed, working on your book, our book.  Every Sunday night when I [...]

Skeletons in the Closet…Ground…and Sea

The coastline of northern Norway rises jagged from the sea in sheer
granite cliffs. Small villages cling to the only arable land, a few
acres of soil at the base of these mountains between the rocks and
waters of the sea. At this time of year, the residents rejoice in an
abundance of wildflowers and a vivid green [...]

And Then She Died

Two years ago on this day, Grandma died. She had a massive stroke the day before and let go on July 3, 2006. She was 92.
As fate would have it, this date is important to our family for another reason. On July 3, 1879, also a Thursday like this year, my grandmother’s grandparents left [...]

After a Brief Intermission… Getting Back to Grandma’s Book

So, yeh, I’ve kinda had a hard time actually writing Grandma’s book this year (meaning academic calendar).  At first it was pure grief.  I couldn’t face it.  Then it was exhaustion.  Then it was other things like galivanting around in the Southern Hemisphere or editing an essay collection.  But the time has clearly come for [...]

Supper at the Shelter

Same old rutted, dirt parking lot. Same loitering, scruffy men and women lingering on the sidewalk. Same feeling of wariness that leads me to lock my purse inside the trunk rather than bring it inside. But something had changed.
Last Thursday I returned to duty, as it were, helping to serve supper at a [...]

Hope Springs Eternal: Spring of Eternal Hope

To me, Easter is hope. Hope that loved ones live on in some way after we lose them. Hope that Spring will follow Winter. Hope that we are not doomed — love makes a difference.
I used to think of hope as a relatively naive emotion, a blind and Pollyanna-ish sentiment ill-founded in reality. [...]

Herding Turkeys, Poultry SpeedBump, and Foul Traffic

After dropping off my son and his classmate at school today, I suddenly came upon a traffic jam on a back road. Morning traffic in New England is notoriously bad, but this particular spot puzzled me. It was well before the IRS complex and nowhere near Raytheon. What was the hold-up?
Earlier, when I [...]

Maple Sugaring in … Lowell?

Last weekend my son and I went to a Maple Sugaring community program in our city, a place which is known as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. You know, old mill buildings, lots of brick, smokestacks, and even some cool old canals. But maple sugaring…? In Lowell?
Well, we do live [...]

Other Words for Grief

“other words for grief” … These words arrested my attention as I scanned search terms folks used who found my blog. Other words. I wonder how much of what I am doing on this site is searching for the words.
Then I got curious about the word “grief.” Being an academic, I decided [...]

On Appreciating One’s Husband…

“I can handle it — no problem,” I told my husband when he asked if it’d be okay to head off to a conference for three days. I figured it’s easy enough for me to play “single mom” while my husband is away on a business trip. And everything IS fine here. But [...]