Last summer my neighbor up the road stopped me as I was walking past. “Me and Joanne got everything we need,” he said.  “We got enough money, we got a nice house.  We even...

Last week my husband and I were sitting on a Florida beach shortly before sunset when a young woman approached and asked us to take a picture of her standing in the surf.  She...

When we lived in Kentucky, our children’s friends called their grandparents Mamaw and Papaw.  In Texas, they were Meemaw and Peepaw.  For my grandchildren, I chose the German version, Oma.  My husband is Opa....

The Viet Nam War was a defining event in my life. I lived in a town of a thousand people where everyone pretty much knew everyone else and the losses were strongly felt. When...

When two people who were walking together would pass on opposite sides of a lamp post or a parking meter or anything, actually — my mother always said “bread and butter”.  I grew up...

Several years ago I was out walking with Jake, our dog at that time. The people about a mile away owned a few cows who that morning had escaped and were wandering around the...

We lived in a small town in North Carolina for a while and everyone had a nickname. Sometimes even a first name sometimes sounded like a nickname. There was Uncle B.B. who was known...

My husband thinks food is the answer. I mean, for everything. Got a stomach ache? Eat. Got a headache? Eat. Feel sad? Eat. Feel happy? Eat. He and I often go head to head...

I saw an article about the high rate of divorce among baby boomers after even forty or fifty years of marriage. Apparently it’s the thing to do. I have never considered myself to be...

More than one of the houses that we lived in over the years, has vanished. The place that housed our family in North Carolina burned to the ground shortly after we moved away. The...