Back when I was child, I watched a Christmas show I have never forgotten. It aired on Dec. 21, 1951 (Thank you, Google), which means I was two months shy of 4 when I sat between my mother and father and learned that all over the world for a few hours every Christmas Eve, animals are given the gift of speech.
Read MoreIt 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 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 MoreWhat I will remember about the summer of COVID-19 are pleasures denied. Hugging. Eating out. Visiting friends. Traveling. Singing. Going to concerts and plays. Sports. Crowds. Trains. Planes. Movies. The laughter of strangers. Lunches and dinner parties. All the freedoms that were part of every summer before this one.
But what I will also remember about the summer of COVID-19 are the unexpected pleasures: the clarity of the air, the freshness even on the hottest of days. This summer, Massachusetts’ air has been like Maine air, a just-scrubbed clean that has made not being able to go to Maine almost OK. I will also remember…
Read MoreMy friend Anne knows her flora and fauna. You walk through the woods with her and she doesn’t say, “Look at that beautiful tree!” She says, “Look at that aspen. Look at that red spruce. A black ash. Wow!” Plus she can identify birds. “See? At the feeder? That’s a male rose-breasted grosbeak.” When she doesn’t know the name of something, she grabs her National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds or her Field Guide to North American Trees and learns the names…
Read MoreI know I drive my grandkids a little crazy, gushing over every tree, pointing out every flower, oohing and ahhing over the yellow of forsythia and the world turned newly green. “Look at those tulips!” I say, letting up on the gas so that the 12-year-old in the front seat has time to turn her head and gaze at a small garden studded with red and orange and yellow. “Look how beautiful they are, Charlotte. And look, next door, at that dogwood…”
Read MoreI have a picture of me, at age 11, in my favorite dress. It was pink, not too pale and not too bright, and it was A-lined and buttoned up the front. I wore a crinoline under it, so the dress swooshed when I walked. In the picture, you can see my white ankle socks, but not my shiny black patent-leather shoes. It was spring. I was in sixth grade at Tower Hill School in Randolph. In seventh grade, I was sent to a Catholic school where I was made to…
Read MoreI meant it this time. I told my husband, my kids, my grandkids, I told everyone I’m done with decorating for every occasion. When I’m dead and God says to me, “What did you do with your time on Earth?,” I do not want to have to answer that I spent my limited days on this planet packing and unpacking Easter bunnies and witches…
Read MoreIt survived the winter. I don't know how. Everywhere — across the street, down the street, all over town — bigger trees with longer histories and better pedigrees lay uprooted and dead, felled by ice and wind and cold...
Read MoreInside my house, it is still Halloween. A giant bat hangs over the sliding glass door. Scary Man, laden with chains, shrieks in the hall. The kitchen witch cackles whenever a dish is clanked or someone bumps into her.
Outside my house, Halloween was over weeks before it arrived. Christmas pushed it aside in the middle of October, wreaths and Santas and holiday deals dwarfing pumpkins and ghouls and candy corn. There was Christmas music…
Read MoreMy favorite holiday isn't a holiday. Yet. But give it time. August is the only month in which there is no national celebration, no reason to pause or give thanks or remember. And shouldn't there be? Isn't August, even by definition, grand and majestic and impressive? Doesn't it deserve to be honored? Plus, don't we love holidays, especially the ones…
Read MoreSometimes you can convince yourself that it isn't bad — summer ending, the rest of the year beginning. But it is bad. I like cool, crisp nights as much as anyone, that hint of a fall smell that's in the shadows right now, and the way the late afternoon light makes the world look suddenly prettier. I like seeing all the little kids with their new haircuts and scrubbed faces, their backpacks as clean as they are, walking to school and waiting at bus stops. I love what September is for them: a beginning, another notch on their growth chart, new grade, new teachers, new chance.
Read MoreMy father took pictures of everything. I have dozens of black-and-white prints labeled "European Campaign — General Eisenhower 1942-1945," and hundreds of slides he took later, after the war, after I was born, which he showed for years in our parlor on a big white sheet, until one day when he bought a real screen. He gave me his photos long before he died. I scanned them into my computer and it's where they live now, at my fingertips, pictures of people and places long, long gone. But just a few clicks, and they fill up my screen.
Read MoreIt is a perfect little tree, the kind a first-grader would draw and be proud of, with a skinny trunk leading up to skinnier branches raised like a music director's skinny arms when she is beckoning an audience to sing. It's a minimalist tree. Not a stunner like the dogwood in front of the Canton Public Library or the magnolias that line Boston's Marlborough Street. Or the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., or California's redwoods. Nobody would ever stop and gape at it. Or take its picture. But I do.
Read MoreKids have no lists. No calendars. No scraps of paper with scribbled reminders to pay bills, get dental floss. No baby sitters to call. No appointments to keep. No shopping to do, no places to go and things to buy. Spreadsheets? Quicken? "Where's the coupon for Jiffy Lube?" and "Has anyone seen the laundry receipt?" "Thank you for contacting me, but I'm away on vacation and will not be checking my e-mail. If you need immediate assistance, please contact. . . All these things are in the future.
Childhood is a paper boat borne along by a lazy breeze on a summer day.
Read MoreAll I want is to be outside. I want to cut the grass and prune the bushes and dig up the ugly ground cover I planted last year that is brown and straggly and taking over the world. I want to rake up the dead leaves and chop down dead bushes and cut back the hydrangeas and plant coreopses and turn on the hose and revel in this most welcome late-blooming, finally burgeoning, amazingly gorgeous spring. A half-hour. One hour at the most. Then I'll come in and do all I have to do. I'll rake just one flower bed. I'll pull just a few weeds. I'll be finished by nine. It won't even make a dent in my day.
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…
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