Sleeping Beauty Arrives with a Spring in Her Step

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Sleeping Beauty Arrives with a Spring in Her Step

I 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…”

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Dancing to Remember the Music of the Past

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Dancing to Remember the Music of the Past

Mrs. X is lovely, a fellow passenger tells my husband and me. But she doesn’t speak much. When asked a question, her husband always answers. Even if it’s a simple question. We are seated with them one night at dinner and I meet her eyes. “Are you enjoying yourself?” I ask. And she smiles and nods and then turns to him to answer. Where are you from? And he says England. Is this your first cruise? And he tells us, no. It is one of many…

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

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Somewhere Between Pretty in Pink and the Lady in Red

I 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…

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Wonderful Memories, Just Beyond Reach

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Wonderful Memories, Just Beyond Reach

If only you could wrap up a few happy moments and give them back to people when they are in need of happiness. If only you could freeze the best of times the way you freeze fresh-picked blueberries in June to savor again on a December day. We have memory, yes. But memory is a tease, a still shot, a small picture of what was, not all of what was. It’s a blueberry pie on the cover of a gourmet magazine, beautiful to look at but tormenting, too…

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We Live in the Same Country, but in Two Different Worlds

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We Live in the Same Country, but in Two Different Worlds

I had never heard of Bryan Stevenson.

I heard his name for the first time in Montgomery, Ala., just last month. There, on top of a hill, sits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the “lynching memorial,” locals call it. It opened last spring. It’s a somber site. Some 800 rust-colored steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins, bear the names of more than 4,000 African-American men, women, and children who were lynched from 1877 all the way up to 1950 simply because of the color of their skin. The monuments hang lynched, too, suspended from a ceiling. They are the history I was never taught in school.

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With Each Paper Crane, a Child’s Love Takes Flight

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With Each Paper Crane, a Child’s Love Takes Flight

I keep looking at them. They arrived in a 12-by-16-inch manila envelope, addressed to my husband. So, technically they are not mine.

“I hope 73 brings you joy and happiness!” Megan, who is 11 and our son’s oldest child, wrote on a card she made for her grandfather. “For your birthday,” she continued, “I made you 73 paper cranes. Each one represents one year of your life.” My husband spreads them out on the couch. They are colorful things…

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A Mysterious Love Story Written in the Sand

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A Mysterious Love Story Written in the Sand

The letters remain this morning. The tide hasn’t erased them. They’re not as sharp as they were yesterday, not as perfectly defined. The wind has blurred their lines. But the words are still readable. HAPPY 60 DAYS OF MARGARET, they say, a billboard in the sand. I watched yesterday from a balcony 11 stories above the ocean as a man using his sandaled feet as tools created these block letters. It seemed easy for him, as if…

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When Joy Triumphs over Our Worst Fears

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When Joy Triumphs over Our Worst Fears

My granddaughter Lucy was born in June 2003, not so long ago, but it was before Facebook, before World Down Syndrome Day, before companies hired models with Down syndrome, before the TV show “Born This Way,” before Google was a verb making it easy for people to network and learn. Lucy was seven hours old when a doctor, who didn’t identify himself as a doctor, walked into my daughter’s hospital room, unswaddled Lucy and announced…

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Penny for Your Memories? Treasure Your Coins for Now

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Penny for Your Memories? Treasure Your Coins for Now

When I was in seventh grade, I memorized “If” by Rudyard Kipling because the Sisters of Notre Dame required us to memorize poems. Kipling wrote “If” to his son, Sister said, to teach him about the importance of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off whenever life throws you a curve. If you can “. . . watch the things you gave your life to, broken. And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools,” is a line I didn’t pay much attention to when I was young, but…

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In the New Year, Let Peace Begin with Each of Us

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In the New Year, Let Peace Begin with Each of Us

There is no peace on Earth. Never has been. Never will be. Not even now. Not even during this season when we sing about “Peace on Earth,” when the words, “joy” and “peace” and “good will” fill the airwaves, and are engraved on wooden plaques at Home Goods and greeting cards at The Paper Store. Peace on Earth, like the fairy-tale workshop at the North Pole packed with jovial, frolicking elves, simply does not exist. And yet…

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Memory of a Christmas Gift Is a Grand Gift Itself

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Memory of a Christmas Gift Is a Grand Gift Itself

It’s something I think of every Christmas and I don’t know why. I am sitting on the couch in my in-laws’ living room. I don’t remember the couch, though I should. I sat on it dozens of times. I am sitting on the end, in the corner, close to the dining room. My sister-in-law, Janet, is sitting on a chair to the left of me.

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Dream Machine Casts Spell at the Walka Walka Mall

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Dream Machine Casts Spell at the Walka Walka Mall

It started with Adam, who is 14 now. He was 4 then. He said “goed” instead of “went.” “I goed to the Walka Walka Mall,” he’d announce every time we took him to the Walka Walka Mall. (The Walpole Mall, where he walked and walked — “walka walka” — his favorite place.) Now it’s the favorite place of my youngest grandchildren.

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A Childhood Bond That Recalls a Sweet Boy’s Smile

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A Childhood Bond That Recalls a Sweet Boy’s Smile

I don’t know if, when you’re in second grade, you can actually want to be someone else, erase who you are and become that other. Maybe what’s truer is that you want to stay who you are, but embellish yourself somehow, like store-wrapped chicken pounded and garnished, chicken still, but fancy now, dressed up as chicken piccata. Rosemary Jablonski was my chicken piccata…

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