The world goes on without us. In the mountains, where my friend Anne lives, there is the certitude of this. The mountains surround and sustain her. She sees them wherever she goes, in front of her, in her rear view mirror, solid, permanent. She derives peace from them. And a quiet strength...
Read MoreI hadn't been back in more than two years to the place that feeds my soul. I went to other places and I thought, this is fine. I don't need one particular plot of earth where the sea meets the sky and I meet God. I found God in people and in landscapes: on my walks with the dog, in my small garden. And I convinced myself that this was enough. I thought I had become wiser. God is everywhere, I said. All I had to do was look and I would see.
Read MoreAl was on his roof Tuesday morning, broom in hand, sweeping. Al, my across-the-street neighbor, is hardly a spring chicken. He should not be climbing ladders. He especially should not be climbing a ladder onto his roof because it is the kind of roof a child draws, a steep upside down V. But there he was climbing, then crawling like a crayfish, standing intermittently to out-out-damn-spot, some spot only he could see. Who, in his right mind, sweeps his roof?
Read MoreA day late and a dollar short. That about sums up this worst storm in 50 years. Monster winds. Record snowfall. Two weather systems converging and stalling. There hasn't been this much hype since the release of "Heaven's Gate," another zealously over advertised bomb. Winter's wrath? Storm of the century? Right. We've been here before how many times?
Read MoreI am trying to look at the bright side of things. Count my blessings. Give thanks for the moment and not wish the moment away. The bright side: This isn't the Yukon. The ice on the front walk has finally melted, making both the mailman and me happy. The days are getting longer, never mind that they're cold and gray and cheerless. And we are on the right side of the year. This is not, thank God, November…
Read MoreAt first it was background noise, nothing more, I swear. I wasn't really listening to the man on the radio talking about root balls, and even if I were, I was only half listening. I was curious, that's all. Not addicted. Not yet. But now I am. Come 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings I'm up and tuned in to 99.1 FM, sitting at the kitchen table listening to Paul Parent tell me things like "clematis requires sweet soil" and the way to make soil sweet is to sprinkle a little lime into it, but not bone meal because that attracts animals…
Read MoreIt has been the nicest spring, more sun than rain, more warmth than cold, April showers bring May flowers, a little behind the curve. April's been full of flowers, the kind you plant and the kind that pop up all over the place all by themselves. They're my favorite kind…
Read MoreThe child was 3, maybe 4, and walking hand in hand with his mother down Charles Street on a beautiful August day. Boston Common was to his left, the Public Garden to his right, The Four Seasons Hotel ahead and the State House behind. The sky was blue, the sun bright and every tree in the city was in bloom. The people were in bloom, too, little kids, big kids, tourists and natives, colorful in their shorts and baseball hats, suits and sundresses. The streets teemed with cars and trucks, bikes and bikers, busses and trolleys and in the distance, there were even more buildings and people and things. It was a page right out of "Where's Waldo."
Read MoreHe was my mother's uncle, not mine. I hardly knew him. But I knew about him. He was part of the family lore. "Stop slouching. You'll look like Uncle Pete." "What are you doing staring at the ground when you walk. You don't want to be like Uncle Pete."
Read MoreThe tree man said he'll come and fertilize the dogwood, which has been a pink umbrella in my backyard every spring for the past 20 years. Last May the tree bloomed in sparse, uneven patches. I knew it was sick. A smaller dogwood had withered and died a few years before. When we cut it down, it was as dry and splintered as driftwood.
I didn't want to believe that this other tree, one I have watched grow tall and thick, a tree that shades the patio where I sit and turns the world surrounding it into a pink haze for a few weeks each year, could suffer the same fate.
Read MorePROUT'S NECK, Maine - The DNA men are inside. It's 5:30 p.m. and they have been at it all day: trading information, speculating, extrapolating, talking nuclei and double helixes, trying to decipher the genetic code of life.
It is noble work they do. Their research will improve, even save people's lives.
But in the meantime, there's today, Oct. 3, a glorious, sunny, warm Indian summer day, set down in the middle of fall.
And they are oblivious to it.
Read MoreIn the winter I can see the field clearly. The old stone wall which separates the football-size rectangle from the narrow road is only knee-high and the bushes and trees and grasses, thick and lush in summer, are scraggy and thin in the cold.
Nothing blocks the view then. The world is barren. The field is barren. A fret of black branches against a gray sky, or the sun rouging the horizon, or a flurry of snow are the only things that catch the eye.
Read MoreI thought I remembered it exactly: my father taking the ceramic dog-bank down from the chest where it sat every day of the year; my mother shaking quarters and dimes and nickels onto the chenille bedspread in their room; the three of us dividing and piling and counting.
Get a knife, they would tell me when the dog had expelled its final coin. I would run into the kitchen and return with a dull blade and poke it through the slit on the top of the dog's head and dig out dollars that were stuck inside, that could be felt more than heard. When the bank was empty, we held our breath and let our eyes savor the piles that stood like silver volcanos on the spread.
Read MoreI was driving to Beverly a few weeks ago and listening to a tape I'd borrowed from the library, a book tape. The tape "Joshua" was a religious parable, which I hadn't realized when I'd checked it out. It was preachy and overly dramatic and tacky.
But I was on a long drive in a car with a broken antenna, and it was this tape or nothing, so I listened.
Read Moret must be a byproduct of age. It must develop like a taste for lobster or pate, or like gray hair, slowly, but inevitably. How else to explain it? When I was young I used to hate working in a garden; now I'm old and I love it. Why?
When I was a child, you couldn't lure me outdoors. My mother tried. She bought me a package of bachelor button seeds and a planter at the five-and-ten and brought in from outdoors a pail full of loam and said, "Here, now you can grow your own garden." She must have believed that once I saw life spring forth from seeds I had personally buried in dirt I would be awed and treasure all life that emerged from the ground. But it didn't work that way. I didn't have any interest in the seeds…
Read MoreThe dream was a subconscious effort to hold on. I dreamed about flowers, fields of vanda orchids, red hibiscus, pink plumeria, hibiscus, anthuriums, birds of paradise. The scent of the flowers followed me out of the dream, along with the heat of the sun, coconut trees rustling in the breeze, waves crashing against the shore.
My husband told me I sang in my sleep. "Hello, sweetheart, aloha. Aloha from the bottom of my heart." "You were actually in tune," he joked. I have never sung in my sleep before. I have never sung this song while awake before. But then I have never felt so removed from reality, so at peace with the world, so content - not in years, not since I was a child.
Read More"Christmas is around the corner," I overheard my mother tell a friend when I was 4 or 5 and lived in the city. I raced into the hall and grabbed my red jacket and hurried down three flights of steps out to the sidewalk. "Don't you go out of the yard," my mother shouted and I yelled, "I won't, Mom" and, of course, did bolting up the street to get to the corner where she said Christmas would be. It wasn't there, of course. No tree. No Santa. No reindeer and sleigh. Just concrete and macadam and three-decker houses lined up on either side. It was my first disappointment with looking around corners.
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