Category: memoirs

• August 11, 2021

  Blue Chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace

  Last week, I joined a free write session on Zoom (where else, these days, right?). With a couple of dozen others, scattered around the country, I took time on a Sunday afternoon to meditate (easier than doing it alone, I find) and to read a poem, then write a reaction to it. It’s amazing to […]
• February 15, 2021

  Only You Can Tell Your Story

  The Covid 19 pandemic has changed lives all over the world, and we cope in different ways. Often, we look for distraction from it. But I’m a big believer in the saying, “The only way out is through.” The isolation, lack of hugs from best friends, missing restaurant meals and movie theaters, takes a toll […]
• November 1, 2019

  Letting Go of Happy

  The other day, I said to my husband, half-joking, “I’m going to be happy before I die, if it kills me!” For as long as I can remember, there’s been a little bit of sadness sitting in the back of my heart. I wanted it to go away. I read lots of self-help books and […]
• March 27, 2019

  Near Miss

  One spring morning when I was four, I had a brush with death. My mother had just walked me and my little sister to “The Butcher’s,” a corner store two blocks from our house in Amsterdam, New York.  Its real name was Partyka’s Market, after the family who owned it, but we never called it […]
• December 29, 2018

  2019- Ready or Not!

  As the old year ends, I feel an urge to finish what I started, as if I need a clean slate to begin 2019. And then I laugh. As if that’s ever going to happen. Just last month, I stopped reading a book I hated. It was for my book club. Which I’m dropping out […]
• April 5, 2017

  When Things Were Not So Different

  We’ve been through tough times before. The world is like that.
• November 11, 2013

  A Veterans’ Day Salute

  My cousin Wayne rode into town with his mother on the Sunday afternoon train and arrived at Grandma’s house wrapped in a whiff of danger. My sister and I were good little girls who knew how to  behave. We sat on Grandma’s porch glider, careful to push off gently, toes to the floor, rocking slowly […]
• April 20, 2009

  Speaking About Writing

  This afternoon, I drove through rainy Bucks and Northampton Counties to Westminster Village, a retirement center in Allentown, PA. The activities people invited me to talk to residents on National Letter Writing Day about The Healing Power of Writing. A small group of women had spent the morning making greeting cards with scrapbooking materials. I […]