After two days of frantic preparations, we are leaving for our annual trek north to Vermont and the Adirondacks. In addition to cancelling the mail and the newspaper and bringing the goldfish to our neighbor's house for safekeeping, this year I also had a long list of errands to do for my mother to make [...]

When you run into people in July, they usually ask, "How's your summer going?" I'm not quite sure how to answer this. Should I mention that my computer, my phone, my car, and my watch all went on the fritz about a week and a half ago? Should I share that my daughter's asthma seems [...]

I was unlocking the padlock on our community garden when a car halted near the gate. There were a few young men, and one shouted out to me: "I've never understood how you can call it a 'community garden' and then put a lock on it." His tone was belligerent, possibly alcohol induced, since the [...]

We left Friends General Conference Gathering on Saturday morning and drove three hours north before stopping for a break near a shady Virginia picnic bench. As I stepped out of the car, my six-year-old son walked into my arms, his face red and contorted. Luke was sobbing so hard I thought he must have closed [...]

I'm now in Virginia at a gathering of Quakers from all over North America and beyond. Internet access has turned out to be rather hard to come by, so one of my spiritual practices for the week is to let go of the desire to check my e-mail frequently. Obviously blogging has been neglected as [...]

Yesterday I attended an elegant brunch on Manhattan’s Upper East Side at a literary club where Mark Twain was honored in his day. Our gathering celebrated the birthday and recent success of my friend Elizabeth Kostova, whose Dracula novel The Historian has made a huge splash in the publishing world. Aside from enjoying the mimosas, [...]

Yesterday my children had their last piano lessons of the school year. They both started in September—my son with the Suzuki method of instruction and my daughter with traditional, which has worked out well for me since they have lessons at the same time from different teachers at the music school. Because they learn different [...]

The children get out of school for the summer tomorrow morning, and camp doesn’t start for three and a half weeks. In the meantime, my mother is still in the hospital (but doing better), and my husband wants to go away for at least some of his vacation next week, assuming my mom is stable. [...]

I checked my eighty-two year old mother into a hospital yesterday. She’s been slowly losing weight, and the doctors haven’t found a cause, other than her lungs, which have been lousy for some time. Now that she’s down to seventy pounds, they want to admit her for more tests, even though they’ve been doing tests [...]

My eight-year-old daughter was cranky when I picked her up from school yesterday. As usual, it took a few hours before the real reason emerged. It seems that two of her best friends are teaching her “how to act cool,” and yesterday’s lesson involved swishing her shoulders provocatively when she walked.“I just can’t do that, [...]