Category: hope

• March 6, 2023

  Making Room

  As spring approaches with its longer days and more time to “do things,” I get a little anxious. What happened to my list of things to do this winter when I looked forward to cozy days writing in my office or sewing or knitting or reading or…? Eeek! Didn’t finish a thing. And now it…
• February 14, 2023

  Valentines, Black history and 2023

  It’s Valentine’s Day, the day we celebrate love. Here in Bucks County, PA, 23 weddings will be performed at the county courthouse. Six proposals were made on live TV on the Today show in New York City this morning. Anywhere you look, you can find articles about how to handle this day. Single women have…
• October 13, 2022

  Election Time. Who Cares?

  Around this time of year, when I was quite young, a car rolled slowly past our house with big round “loudspeakers” fastened to the roof, from which blared the voice of a man telling us who to vote for, a voice I heard even after the car rounded the corner and moved down the next…
• July 15, 2022

  The Last Witness

  There is a poem I love called The Last Uncle by Linda Pastan. It captures the feeling I had when my own last uncle died. My mother’s brother John was the last person I knew who had witnessed the Great Depression and WWII. Everyone who knew me as a child had now left the planet.…
• May 17, 2022

  It’s Touching

  Yesterday, a woman I know only slightly rubbed my arm. “I like to touch people,” she said. “It’s good for us.” She happens to be a very sweet, kind person whom I like, so I didn’t mind. We had a little exchange about how we felt we had to do air hugs at the beginning…
• March 16, 2022

  Are You a Dangerous Woman ?

  Did you know the FBI kept a 300-page file on Nobel-prize winning novelist, Pearl S. Buck? Or that civil rights organizer Pauli Murray was openly transgender? For Women’s History Month, Pearl S. Buck International, where I volunteer, is offering a virtual exhibit entitled “Dangerous Women.” You can view it here. When I took a look,…
• February 14, 2022

  Code Blue Valentine

  One day last week, I drove a friend to her doctor’s appointment. The temperature on my car thermometer read 42 in the garage and dropped ten degrees before I was even out of our street. Going up the highway, the numbers went down…32, 28, 20, 19. Stopping at the library to drop off two books,…
• October 19, 2021

  Carol Ann and the Lumberyard

  Today I started to write a post about my love of the smell of fresh lumber, but the words felt familiar. I looked up previous blogs and saw that I wrote about this same exact thing in May! Of this year! Covid brain? Maybe. But what about this: Coming out of the shower at my…
• March 19, 2021

  Fishing at Spring Time

  When my son was three, we took him to a park with a stream, where we planned to teach him to fish. His little fist gripped a blue Mickey Mouse fishing rod as his older brother, his father and I led him down a small hill from the parking lot, carefully picking our way among…
• April 8, 2020

  Hot Steam on Cotton

  This is not another post on how to cope with pandemic anxiety or how to best manage your time in social isolation. I have nothing new to say about that, and frankly, the online “noise” is getting to me. So I’ll keep this short. Away from my normal life, I find myself looking at homemaking…
• January 1, 2020

  When Hope is Hard to Find

  The title is a quote from one of my favorite hymns, written in 1976 by Carolyn McDade, called “Come Sing a Song With Me.” When she taught the song at a women’s state prison in Framingham, Massachusetts, she said she had to stop singing herself and listen to the women’s voices. “That song needs context—‘I’ll…