I say out loud, every day, that I am so grateful for e-mail and FaceTime and WhatsApp, for all the technology that lets me see and talk to my grandchildren, though they are in Scotland and I am an ocean away. I try to remind myself how lucky I am. My son sends me photos of the kids in their school uniforms. They started school last week. He takes pictures on his phone and…
Read MoreShe counts among the people I could call at three in the morning, a surprising fact even to me, because I don’t call her, not even at three in the afternoon. We haven’t talked in five, maybe 10 years.
And yet.
Read MoreThe bars were invisible, but they were there. In front of us. Behind us. Beside us. Inside us. We didn’t live in actual cages, but we were caged. For 16 unpredictable and unparalleled months, so many of us lived hunkered down in fear of the unknown. Our homes were our cages. We felt safe at home. We had groceries delivered and we disinfected them before putting them away. We wiped down everything: doorknobs, bannisters, remotes, our phones, the mail. We binge-watched TV. Played games. FaceTimed. Read books. Cooked. Baked. Ate. Slept.
Read MoreOn June 1, my daughter Julie asked if i would take pre-prom pictures of some Canton High seniors and I said yes, although I hadn’t picked up my camera in more than a year. I charged the battery, cleaned the lenses, formatted my SD card, packed my bag, and set off to the house where the seniors were gathered.
Read MoreA letter arrived a few weeks ago, an honest-to-God old-fashioned letter tucked in an envelope and delivered by the US Postal Service. Among the bills, it stood out because there it was, a plain, white envelope, with my name and address spelled out in actual handwriting.
Read MoreI am so busy taking care of things, that sometimes I forget to look at him. Doctor’s appointments. Medications. Physical therapists, occupational therapists. Who is scheduled this week? What day? What time? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? I see him, of course. I see his thin, white hair, his faded blue eyes, his false teeth that sometimes slip when he’s talking, the way his mother’s did, his hearing aid that shrieks its presence but is as useless as a bandaid behind his deaf ear. An old man in an old chair, struggling to see, to hear, to keep up, to get up, and to not give up.
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 MoreFor months, I imagined what freedom, post-pandemic, would feel like. For many more months, I couldn’t imagine freedom at all. When lockdown began 13 months ago and we were all shut inside, confined to our homes, wiping down groceries that were delivered, disinfecting the mail, scrubbing our hands every five minutes, peering at the world through closed windows, all of us prisoners of something we could not see, I thought: I never imagined this. I never anticipated a virus that would change our lives.
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 MoreA man died suddenly on February 25th. His name was George Thomas IV. He was 38, married, the father of two boys who are 5 and 3, and a baby daughter who is due in August. It was early evening. He was working out in his basement. And he collapsed. His wife, Marissa, found him.
Read MoreMy brain is acting out. It is in high dudgeon. I say “Help,” and it says “No.” I say “Please,” and it slams a door. I put a stick of butter in the microwave to soften and then forget to add it to the blueberry muffins. I decide to take a walk and then walk in and out of my house a half dozen times because I forget first my scarf, then my AirPods, then my phone, my glasses, my mask, a tissue, hand sanitizer. If I didn’t forget so much, if I weren’t always searching for things, my Fitbit would have nothing to record.
Read MoreThe chair was Judy Taylor’s idea. She has one in her bedroom, a big, comfortable chair. It’s where every day she sits for a little while and reads. We were with our husbands on a cruise ship, on vacation. Remember vacations? Lying around reading something compelling? We were both reading “The Couple Next Door,” sipping some sugary drink and thinking about nothing except how great the sun felt and what we were going to eat next. This is exactly what Judy and I were doing — reading and drinking and talking — when the conversation turned to her “reading chair” and how much she loved it. “You need to get one,” she told me.
Read MoreI moved into the house I have lived in for nearly half a century kicking and screaming. Not physically, of course. But in my head I was railing. I did not want to move from the small, two-bedroom ranch that was my husband’s and my first home. I loved everything about that house — the kitchen cabinets we painted yellow a few months before our wedding, the living room with its 1970s green, wall-to-wall carpet (which I loved to vacuum), the family room my Uncle Frank fashioned from our one-car garage when I was newly pregnant and making plans to turn our TV room into a nursery…
Read More“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” is a children’s board book that my friend Anne gave me to read to my first grandchild, Lucy. I read it to her for years. It never captured me. I liked “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” much better. But Lucy liked the repetition of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” and when Adam came along, he liked it, too. “We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! We’re not scared. Uh-uh! Grass! Long wavy grass. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”
Read MoreI am trying to put a spin on it, trying to look back at 2020 and cherry-pick some good things that happened in this god-awful year. There have been good things, right? Babies born. So many babies. I see their pictures on Facebook: Haley’s son, Carter; Ali’s son, Benjamin; Emily’s daughter, Maeve; Meryl’s twin grandsons, Leo and William. In all the pictures the babies are beautiful and everyone looks happy…
Read MoreAmy has called me Mimi since the afternoon we met. She was 5 then and though I wasn’t her Mimi, my grandson Adam, who also was 5, called me Mimi so she did, too. I’m still not Amy’s Mimi. Not officially. But unofficially, in our patchwork quilt of a family, I am. I am Mimi and Amy is my granddaughter because she is the daughter of my daughter’s partner, and until the world comes up with better words for what we mean to each other, we’re stuck using words that don’t quite fit. Which is ironic considering that Amy Hylen is a stickler for words.
Read MoreOur Christmas tree is in the kitchen this year, definitely an odd place for a 6-foot tree. It’s a tight fit. But the kitchen is where we hang out now, the kitchen and the family room right next to it, not the fancier living room where we and past Christmas trees lived.
Read MoreMy cousin Darlene sent the photo in a text message. Our cousin Jan had e-mailed it to her. I had never seen it before. It’s a black and white shot of two girls on a beach, young women you’d call them today, but girl is who each was back then, in the early 1950s. Beautiful girls, both of them. One salt, one pepper, the blonde in a black bathing suit, the raven-haired one in white…
Read MoreEvery day it gets a little harder to keep the faith. I’m trying. But I’m failing more than succeeding. I live in two separate worlds. The world around me. The world in which I exist every day. My house. My street. All the places I visit. The people I know. The people I see. The people I text and e-mail and talk to. Old friends. New friends. I don’t see hate or division in my very small world.
Read More
ABOUT COLUMNS ARCHIVES WHAT’S ON MY MIND GALLERY IT’S NEVER TOO LATE BOOKS CONTACT
Copyright © 2020 Beverly Beckham
Web Design by: SKILLARA | Marketing + Media
