The manger was my mother's. But I hadn't thought about its history for a long, long time, because the figurines Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the wise men and the sheep and the cow and the horse and the angels are mine, bought over decades, all porcelain, all white, the small, wooden manger the sole thing that was hers. It's in the background of a picture I keep on my desk all year long…
Read Moren the beginning, the trees were rag-tag things, missing more limbs than they had. Even Charlie Brown wouldn't have bothered with them.
But my father always did. He'd come home on a December night, a man with a mission, dragging in a long, skinny sapling, branches awry, half its needles frozen, the other half gone. "It's ugly," my mother and I would say. "It's a work in progress," he'd announce, then go get…
Read MoreIt wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not after all they have been through. Not after all the hope and prayers and therapies and people storming the heavens. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed nothing will be impossible to you. That’s what we’re told. They had faith. And they didn’t want to move anything as big as a mountain. All they wanted was to save a child, their child, to make their child well…
Read MoreCharlotte’s Run, which begins on April 10 at 10 AM at the Granite Grill in Braintree,(cq) is all because of Charlotte Rose Kelly. But it is not for her. It’s to raise money to annihilate a disease that this brave but tired four-year-old has been battling for nearly two years. Charlotte was two-and-a half, when five doctors walked into a room at Children’s Hospital Boston and gave her parents, Patrice and Greg Kelly (cq) the incomprehensible news that their beautiful little girl had Stage IV Neuroblastoma, (cq) a rare and deadly form of childhood cancer...
Read MoreIn the end, after a few hours, a few months, I dismiss these things. Chalk them up, as Ebenezer Scrooge did, to ``an undigested piece of beef.'' The butterfly that shadowed me the day after my father died. The bird that found a crack in a window and flew into my house after my mother died. Messengers, at first. But in time, simply a butterfly, simply a bird.
Read MoreA few months ago, my daughter Julie was worried about her daughter, Charlotte, who, though almost 2, wasn't talking.
"Charlotte points and says 'unk.' It's the only thing she says. She calls everything 'unk,'” she told her pediatrician. He nodded his head…
Read MoreChildren make the world go away. It's that simple.
The barrage of bad news on radio and TV, in newspapers and books, the endless deceit and fraud and abuses and lies, public and private, all the wars and broken hearts and broken bodies and broken dreams.
World without mend, amen.
Children displace these things. Not forever, but for a while.
Read MoreI met Al first. He was the one I watched from my window, washing his car, sweeping the driveway, cleaning the gutters, mowing and raking and shoveling. He was the one walking his big black dog, Dante, carrying in the groceries and taking out the trash, waving and smiling and talking to everyone along the way. He used to watch my dog, Molly, when my husband and I were out of town…
Read MoreIt's the first time in a year I've seen Rosemary happy. The strain is gone from her face. The tension in her neck, her eyes, the way she held herself tight, the way she was braced for tragedy - all vanished, like a soul exorcised, like night dispelled by day.
Read MoreMy daughter, Lauren, is always teaching me something.
When she was an infant and colicky and inconsolable, she taught me that sunshine really does follow rain. Because once the colic passed, there she was, all sweetness and smiles, a happy baby, a happy toddler, a happy child. When she was in first grade, she taught me to pay more attention to time, because there she was, suddenly, climbing onto the school bus, a little girl with two long ponytails, the baby she'd been so soon gone.
Read MoreA woman lives and dies out of the spotlight, 88 years on earth; and who, besides her family and friends, knows the mountains she's climbed, the fears she's faced, the impossible things she's accomplished? Without headlines or a song or a book or paparazzi to record the story, what happens to the story?
In words, Louise Nolan's story would describe a saint - selfless, loving, faithful, kind. But she wasn't a saint. Saints are stoic. Saints endure, carry on, play the hand life deals. Saints sacrifice.
Louise didn't sacrifice. She loved.
Read MoreThere's a Willie Nelson song that keeps playing in my head. "I've been feeling a little bad, 'cause I've been feeling a little better without you."
My aunt Lorraine died 10 years ago and the song, I suppose, is a reminder that not only have I survived, but that I have grown, too, and despaired and rejoiced and wept and failed and laughed and succeeded, all without this woman I was certain I could not live without.
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 MoreI can’t stop thinking about my friend Jill’s new grandson. I look at his photo and smile. I speak his name - Chase Henry – just to say it. And I tell people – neighbors, friends, people at the gym, strangers in line at the deli - about this little boy, whom no one has met yet, but who is already, totally loved. “It isn’t official, but here’s our baby BOY!” Jill’s daughter e-mailed. The phone call she’d been waiting for had finally come. After years that felt like decades, Tara and her husband Rob are at long last parents-in-waiting.
Read MoreI found it in a card shop in Concord, N.H. - Caardvark's, a place that is now closed. It was hanging on a wall and it was perfect.
I'd been looking for perfect. My daughter was newly engaged and I wanted something special to celebrate the moment. For this was my baby who was getting married, my youngest child leaving home not for a little while, not for college, or for a summer, or to test her wings. But to fly away - with someone else - forever.
Read MoreIs this what happens as you age? Does everything new always bring back the memory of something old? Is the past both a minefield and an archeological dig only to those who have lived 40 or 60 or 80 years? Or does this happen to 20-year-olds, too? A puppy makes you think of your old dog young. A birthday brings back other birthdays. A perfect October day makes you think of other October days.
Read MoreI thought it was the rain, long days of it. No sunshine. No color. I thought, I'll be fine when the rain stops. But when it stopped, finally, last Monday and the sky brightened for a while, I wasn't fine. It was June 5, my mother's birthday, and though she has been absent from this life for many years, the lack of her felt new, my loss startling, like walking into a familiar room and banging into a glass door.
Read MoreYour whole life, all you hear about is romantic love. It’s the stuff of fairy tales when you’re young, and poetry when you’re older, and six-handkerchief movies, paperback novels, and Lifetime TV, now and forever.
A kiss from a beloved awakens not just a sleeping princess…
Read MoreI had been thinking about her. That's the way these things happen. Coincidence? A random pairing of events? Or something more? Sound just out of earshot? Sunlight, bright and steady, but in another room? I had been remembering who knows why? being a child sitting on a kitchen chair, my face pressed against a window, waiting for my aunt to come and play with me. I could hardly say her name. "Rain coming?" I would ask my mother, "Lorraine" too big a word, "Aunt Lorraine" impossible.
Read MoreThey are just things and things shouldn't mean so much. But they do.
Most are old and many are broken. A musical clock, a plastic reindeer, a dime store manger, Santa at his desk, a faded ornament they all tug at me.
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