It goes back to my mother. Almost everything does. My mother is why I love black-and-white movies and Rosemary Clooney and show tunes and big, gaudy hats, though I look awful in them. Why I make Irish bread with caraway seeds. Why I thought, and think still, that no one will ever take the place of Johnny Carson. Why I don’t put new shoes on a table. Why, to this day, I wish upon the first star.
Read MoreIt’s just weather, people say. What’s a little rain? What’s a little snow? You shouldn’t let it affect your mood.
But it does. It’s hard to be cheery on a gray winter’s day.
Think of it as silver, my granddaughter, Amy, says. Amy doesn’t need the sun to be happy. She is the sun. She’s away at college now, she left in September, but she continues to message uplifting sayings often written by anonymous someones to feed the world’s weary souls.
Read MoreIt’s a week old, ancient history in today’s fast-paced, frantically frenetic world. And it’s superfluous, too. What’s a rainbow anyway but the sun’s rays distilled into colorful arcs? Nothing magical or newsworthy about this. It’s science. It happens. And yet, Saturday’s rainbow must have worked some magic because it cast a spell. “Go outside and look up at the sky,” my daughter texted. “There’s the most beautiful rainbow.”
Read MoreThe tree in my front yard looks dead. It’s an eyesore, an ugly twig, not even 5 feet high, held upright by an equally ugly pole. Think Charlie Brown tree only without a hint of green. But take your fingernail and scratch the bark from the tree and a pale green line appears. Even in the tiniest branch, there is green. The tree is alive. What appears to be dead isn’t. It’s the lesson that spring teaches us over and over...
Read MoreA long time ago, there were oak trees in my front yard. Three of them in the beginning. And then one got sick and died and we had it cut down and carted away.
I loved those trees. They kept me company as I wrote. For years I watched birds nest in them and squirrels catapult from one to the other. The trees muffled the sound of traffic, too, though traffic was light then, so scarce that on warm days, with my window open, I could hear not just birds cawing and squirrels skittering, but leaves, even tender, spring leaves, rustling.
Read MoreMy husband says I would know if I swallowed an ant. I'm not so sure. Right up until the ant, it had been a perfect day. Sunshine. Warmth. I got to play in my garden for the first time in so long that I had forgotten how the earth smells in spring: new like the top of an infant's head; fresh, like my dog Molly's breath when we first met her, when she was just 6 weeks old…
Read MorePlanting bulbs is an act of faith. You dig holes, take some dry, scaly ugly things out of a paper bag, place them right side up in the holes, cover them with dirt, watch rain and snow and ice entomb them. And you wait and wait and wait, believing they will transform themselves into things of beauty. When I was a kid, one of my favorite ``Superman'' episodes - the old black-and-white half-hour show starring George Reeves - showed the Man of Steel holding a piece of coal in his hand and squeezing it, turning the coal, in seconds, into a diamond. That's what the Earth does, Superman explained, only it takes the Earth a million years. This was magic to me…
Read MoreI haven't tended my garden this year. Spring came and went and because it was always raining, I didn't prune or weed or mulch. Summer followed spring, and the rain stopped, but still I didn't go in search of my gardening gloves.
A few weeks ago, only because we were having house guests, I grabbed my favorite spade, my trusty hoe, and some well-worn clippers and went to work hacking away at overgrown bushes and at a weed/vine tenacious thing that every year tries to strangle whatever else is in bloom. I yanked and pulled and…
Read MoreIt's perennial wisdom, the stuff of graduation cards and a top contender on lists of ``best advice.'' You have to look at the big picture. This is what we tell our kids and it's what responsible adults told us. The big picture is the Holy Grail. To be a success, you have to know where you are going and you have to have a plan. ``Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.'' I have always loved this analogy. But the truth is I find the big picture - from the simplest question asked of a child, ``What do you want to be when you grow up?'' to the most complex asked years later, ``What's it's all about, Alfie?'' - overwhelming…
Read MoreThey're intrepid little flowers, dancing in the snow, lovely things - these orange and yellow marigolds that I have disparaged my whole life. They are the last to leave the party, a sudden standout because they stand alone.
The violet charm clematis that grew tall and leggy behind them; the blood red dahlias that dazzled beside them; the pinks and the plums and the purples that swayed and sashayed their way through June, July, and August, outshining them every day - did not outlast them. They have all vanished now like Cinderella's coach and gown. The clock struck, and they withered…
Read MoreI am putting the garden to bed. Raking leaves. Cutting back shrubs. Pulling out yellow loosestrife. Trimming. Thinning. Transplanting. Digging up dahlias and drying them off and storing them in the cellar in paper bags. Emptying ceramic pots and lugging them to the cellar, too, so they don't crack in the cold. I am puttering and pruning and planting. Katherine, my friend across the street, finished all these things weeks ago. She has already planted red and yellow tulips for next spring. She has already fertilized her grass. She has even grown new grass…
Read MoreI don't know when the birds became important. Knowing their names and their sounds. And the garden. Working it. Growing it.
Once upon a spring, it was all about the boys, chasing them away through most of grade school, first, second, third, fourth, and fifth grade, then suddenly, one day, reversing the game and running after them. Lilacs enclosed my old schoolyard, huge hedges of them that were taller than the tallest sixth-grader. And every May they perfumed the air in our stuffy, overcrowded classroom…
Read MoreI planted 200 tulips last Nov 14. I know this because I wrote it down in my gardening journal, a little book my family contends is proof that I am clearly obsessed. Who, over the age of 6, they ask, cuts out pictures of morning glory and columbine and saves the little stick-in-the ground plastic identifiers that come with potted plants? I try to explain, as I search for my glue stick and scissors, that at least what I cut and paste in my journal stays put. Look. See? Orange tulips tinged with yellow. Purple anemones. Baby coreopsis. Sapphire blue delphinium. This is what is supposed to be growing in my garden right now…
Read MoreThey ate my Jack and the Beanstalk tree. From stem to leafy stem they felled it, devoured it, and made it disappear. Rabbits, I fumed. Bandits and thieves. And other names I cannot repeat. It wasn't, for the record, a real Jack and the Beanstalk tree. It didn't grow from magic beans overnight and disappear above the clouds into a land of giants. It wasn't even a tree, just a leggy, flowering plant. But it was taller than I am by at least a foot, and to the 3- and 4-year-olds who called it their Jack and the Beanstalk tree, it seemed to reach the sky…
Read MoreMy husband said I should put the bird out of its misery. "It will never fly again. Why are you doing this?" The sparrow, small and frail and biblical, got its neck stuck in the crook of a wrought-iron arm that holds a bird feeder, which I bought last week in a small store in New Hampshire. The feeder, the holder, the bag of special seed were purchased from an old New Englander who's been selling bird food and feeders his whole life. My other feeders are markdowns and seconds. But this was the real thing, "Droll Yankees The World's Best Bird Feeders," a Lexus in my world of Fords. Even the seed was a special blend.
Read MoreI used to have a pet rabbit. I had more than one, actually, though not at the same time. The first was named - no surprise here - Thumper, and lived in a hutch my brand new husband built in our backyard. I used to walk Thumper up and down the street on a short leash meant for a poodle. He was our first official now-we-are-a-couple pet (unless you count Irving, the bird) and when I discovered him dead in his cage one afternoon, I screamed so loud my mother-in-law, who lived next door, came running. A few months later, we got Ovaltine. We found him…
Read MoreThere's something about growing older that makes a person a little nutty about the seasons. It makes a person behave as if she's never before seen a tree turned all orange, or a pumpkin, or a garden transformed by mums. ``Hey, what do you know? It's fall, already. Hard to believe that summer is over. Where did it go?'' What child says these things? Or adolescent walking to school? ``Look at the way the sun lights up that yard. And the berries on that mountain ash. Wow.'' This does not happen. But adults? We're consumed by the changes a season brings…
Read MoreWe look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough. - Ralph Ellison
Especially these mornings. You wonder why anyone hasn't written a song about them. October deserves music and lyrics, long sighs, and an emcee's "Ta da!" Pink dawns that bloom into sparkling white days. Clean, clear air with a chill that somehow warms. Deep shadows. Green lawns. Roses AND mums. It doesn't get any better.
Read MoreThe national threat level: from orange to yellow and back again. Twenty degrees one day, zero the next. Snow everywhere. And bad news. Month after month of it. Except for the miracle of Elizabeth Smart, it was all bad news. The winter was miserable. It was long and dark and hard and scary. And it refused to leave. But here we are on the other side of it. Most of us anyway. Those of us who didn't lose anyone to the winter or the war. For us, finally, the bad time is over. It's May and if it's a little cloudy and rainy, who cares?
Read MoreYou wonder what makes an ordinary day stand out in memory. Who takes the mental snapshots that we see when we look back through time? There are no real snapshots recording the day, because there was nothing special about it. Nothing special at all.
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