Although we’ve been home for a few weeks now, I’m still humming the Simon & Garfunkel song that starts out, “Gee but it’s great to be back home.” After three weeks on the road and almost 4,000 miles on the odometer, it was, indeed, great to be back home. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. In the three weeks we were gone, my husband and I visited with family in Chicago and Minnesota, then drove down to Dallas for a convention, and finally [...]
I had numerous feelings of déjà vu recently when my husband and I flew to Phoenix. From there we rented a car and drove to California to visit our daughter, then back to Phoenix to visit some friends there that we haven’t seen in a long, long time. The déjà vu kept popping up because this was the same itinerary we had last November, when we had to cancel our plans after learning that a tree fell on our house and punched a hole in [...]
It’s been seven years since my husband and I moved to Georgia from Minnesota. The first summer we were here, both of our kids and their spouses came to visit over the 4th of July, and we all had a great time. In fact, our son said, “I know where we’ll be going every year for our summer vacation.” It didn’t turn out that way, however. By the next summer, our daughter-in-law was pregnant, and long-distance travel would have been uncomfortable at best. By the [...]
I met a friend for coffee and catch-up last week. At one point, she pulled out a pocket-sized notebook to write herself a reminder for something she had to do later. “I just bought myself a fancy new notebook,” she told me, “but whenever I need to write myself a note, this is the one I always use.” She added that she doesn’t want to “mess up” her new notebook with notes and scribbles. She wants whatever she writes in it to be perfect. We [...]
“Follow the light.” Those were the instructions given to me as I got ready for my first cataract surgery. And frankly, it made me nervous for a moment—just long enough to remember all the movies and stories in which someone died, or had a near-death experience, with a bright light beckoning them to the other side. I wasn’t really nervous about the surgery—not too much, anyway. Since the time I found out I needed it, I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve had it [...]
I’m on Day 15 of a 21-day challenge I started on April 4. Please don’t do the math. Not long ago, a friend of mine mentioned she was getting ready to begin a 21-day challenge for toning and strengthening her arms. A few days later, we had an unseasonably warm day, and I texted my friend this message: “I put on a short-sleeved shirt this morning and realized I REALLY need that 21-day arm challenge! Can you send me the link?” It was a pretty [...]
I recently went back to school again, and I was amazed at all I learned. Especially since I was there for barely an hour. The Georgia Writers Museum offers a number of educational programs, one of which is a Junior Board consisting of students in a Leadership class at the county high school. When the teacher of the class was recently named Teacher of the Month, and one of the students in her Leadership class—and on our Junior Board—was named Student of the Month, it [...]
Our church was crowded last Sunday, as it always is on Easter. Sitting in the pew in front of us was a young family. The two boys, about five and ten years old, were well-behaved and well-dressed, each in tan pants, a button-down shirt, and an adorable bow tie. This reminded me of a column I wrote more than 20 years ago, about another Easter Sunday. I think it’s still relevant today: As I waited for Mass to begin on Easter morning, I watched some [...]
Throughout the Lenten season, I’ve been reading daily meditations from a booklet our church distributed at the beginning of Lent. Each meditation is just two pages long. The first page usually tells the story of a saint or saintly person relevant to that day in history, such as St. Patrick on March 17. The booklet understandably refers to the day as “The feast of St. Patrick,” rather than “St. Patrick’s Day.” The second page of each meditation begins with a Biblical verse focusing on the [...]
When I was a freshman in college, I went to Ft. Lauderdale over spring break with my roommate and a few other friends. One day, on a very crowded beach, a sour-looking older woman sitting near us asked us what school we were from. We told her, and she rolled her eyes. She was a teacher at another college, whose dates for spring break differed from ours, but overlapped by a few days. “I came here on vacation,” she told us, “to get away from [...]