Amazon is promoting Healing Maddie Brees by giving away a FREE KINDLE COPY of the book to anybody who bought a paperback copy! You can take advantage of this even if you bought or pre-ordered the book long ago. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can read it on the Kindle app for iPhone […]
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I feel as if I’ve done a lot of traveling lately. It’s that time of year, right? Summer vacation. We’re gone, we’re here, we’re gone again. Definitely not complaining. I love to travel. But lately it’s got me thinking about how I pack. Like most people (everyone?), I’m guessing I have the normal categories: clothes, […]
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We are in New England for the week, staying on a farm in a quiet corner of Rhode Island. It’s beautiful here–because it’s New England, because it’s green and wooded, because it’s about ten degrees cooler than any July at home. Of course we want New England to look as it *should,* and Rhode […]
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Here’s a relatively new delight in my life: Any and every time I type the letter “m” into the Internet search bar on my computer screen, “Merriam-Webster.com” appears. Instantaneously. (I know what you’re thinking: That delights you? That? To which I respond: Yes. That. And I realize it’s a relatively small thing on the epically […]
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It feels like only weeks ago I was sitting at my little table in the public library. Biography section on the left, self-help on the right, and me at my table in the middle because here was a bright space with a window. I sat there almost every Monday morning for a span of three […]
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“I only have six more months to be a kid,” he said. Out of the blue, just standing there in the living room. What was I doing? Passing through, I suppose, on my way to the next busy-ness, the way it usually goes with me. But I was arrested by the question, and then made a […]
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See him: Small boy in plaid shorts. Helmet. Sneakers. Socks pulled high on the shin. He is no more than four, maybe a little bit three. He is trying to push his bicycle off the paved trail and into the pine straw, but only the front tire has made it. Rear tire and training wheels […]
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There are a lot of ways to know people. There’s the Facebook kind of knowing, the Instagram kind. You know the names of their children, and their dogs. The seminal events, the proud moments, the way their cat curls over a sofa when it rains. Then there’s the pass-you-in-the-hallway, we-work-together kind. The kind you might chat […]
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My mother told me, “Books are your friends.” What was I doing? Standing on some, maybe. Or I had thrown one across the room? Maybe I’d written in one: our old family copy of Charlotte’s Web, which I somehow managed to take with me when I left my parents’ house, and which I read to our children […]
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I made a mistake. I see that now. I very clearly should have known better. And, in truth, I did know better. And said as much. It’s just that, also, I hoped. The email came from a deeply thoughtful, intelligent friend. One sensitive to the many challenges we all face in life: the busy-ness, the […]
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