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....

A women from an Eastern European country told me when she first moved here, people would pass her and say “How’re you?” but before she had time to answer, they walked on. She didn’t...

The Outer Banks of North Carolina have been in the news a lot lately. As of this posting, ten houses have collapsed into the ocean over the past several weeks. A hurricane didn’t come...