There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about and miss my father. Perhaps it was the kindness that was so much his hallmark… perhaps it was his endless patience and his willingness to drop whatever he was doing to listen, to care, to act. “Want to read me a book, Papa?” [ Read More ]
Bronwyn at three and a half was already a Montessori scholar. Daily she trudged to an enlightened classroom where a teacher who genuinely liked children taught her how to scrub her desk with soapsuds, mess it up with fingerpaint and repeat the process. She was understandably enthralled. So much so, that Cee Cee at 2½ [ Read More ]
I had a very hard time with my Mother, her words mostly wounding, her anger terrifying. It was my father’s kind and loving heart that saved my childhood and my spirit. So when Mother’s Day comes round a tug of war ensues. I feel my heart segue-ing not to memories of my own childhood but [ Read More ]
I’m in love with my dog. There’s really no other way to express it. He’s a former pound-puppy, rescued from the Humane Society at 5 months, now grown to 120 pounds of pure, unadulterated love and devotion. When Dakota went off to college five years ago, and my nest was disturbingly empty for the first [ Read More ]
There it was on top of the armoire, quiet in the dust of the years, the bright red newsboy cap that had been my Father’s favorite as long as I could remember. Like the tin soldier in Eugene Field’s poem Little Boy Blue, “awaiting the touch of a little hand, the smile of a little [ Read More ]
My mother could foretell death, my daughter described her own death in heartbreaking detail a month before it happened, we had a family Banshee and my aunts tended to communicate by telepathy. In short, we were Irish, so none of that was beyond the Pale of plausibility. You can imagine why, coming from such a [ Read More ]
It occurred to me today, as I found myself standing in the middle of the family plot talking to the people I love who are no longer with me except in spirit and memory, that anyone not Irish might consider it odd to find comfort in a cemetery. Yet, I always do. I’d gone there [ Read More ]
5:00 a.m. It’s just me and the tree. The house is quiet. Nobody else loves the morning as I do, since my father’s gone. There’s snow on the ground and sleet has turned the trees outside to fairyland, ice palaces crisscrossing my front yard, transforming the winter-blue light into a magical dreamscape. I throw a [ Read More ]
Love manifests in the strangest ways. Just like courage. And understanding. Sometimes it sneaks up on you and you don’t realize how great a gift it is or how much self-sacrifice was required of the giver. Until later, much later in the game of life, when you’ve grown old enough to know that nothing is [ Read More ]
I have a beloved sister, Conny, nearly 13 years younger than I. We’re quite different in appearance, profession, proclivities, talents and even in sexual orientation, but in our hearts, we’re pretty much cut from the same cloth. We’ve worked together in one way or another, for a lifetime, certain this is not the first lifetime [ Read More ]