One of my granddaughters is a crossing guard at her school. She gets to authoritatively stand at one of the crosswalks before and after school and stop cars so kids can walk across...

I love walking. I can’t remember how I hurt my foot last spring but I was only able to limp around for months. I self diagnosed it as plantar fasciitis although I’d had that...

I remember Snow White’s stepmother constantly demanding, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” And of course the mirror always answered with the poetic Disney equivalent of, “It’s you, baby....

I’ve been thinking about an Op-Ed piece I read back on Thanksgiving Day. Someone wrote about the difference between feeling grateful and feeling fortunate and I’m not sure I’d ever considered the difference. The...

My dad grew up in the early 1900’s on a farm in southern Wisconsin. There was neither money nor time for Christmas decorating. There were chickens to feed. Cows that had to be milked....

When I was four years old my family moved to Eagle River, a small town in northern Wisconsin where I then grew up. We bought the house that we did my mother said, because...

When I was in England I saw kids and dogs in pubs and I loved it. The pubs were gathering places for both social and political discourse and felt super warm and welcoming. When...

I took piano lessons when I was a kid. My mother started me in the first grade but I had no interest in practicing. I was granted a reprieve and started lessons again in...

My mother’s given name was Esther. It was an honor for her at the time to have been named after her maternal grandmother but Esther is a name that fell out of popularity somewhere...

Back in the fifties my mother ranked tattoos and pierced ears in the same category. “Only gypsies have pierced ears,” she told me, totally ignoring the fact I considered that to be a positive....