“Turn a corner and meet your fate.” A quote from Woodrow Wilson’s future wife, after the chance meeting that led to their eventual courtship and marriage.  I heard this expression for the first time...

Every spring we get pumped up to have a vegetable garden.  We order seeds and buy starts, plant everything and rejoice as things germinate and grow.  However — both my husband and I dislike...

I am a sighted person.  If I had not ever known sight, I wonder how I would imagine things. How would I “visualize”?  How did Helen Keller, without sight OR hearing, form pictures in...

I consulted Yelp to help find a new place for lunch when we were recently in Florida.  Clary’s, according to the app, had the best food around — homemade everything. From soup to sandwiches...

When I was growing up I took piano lessons from a delightful short, round and ancient Franciscan nun named Sister Adeline.  She had seen Paderewski play when she was a child, she told me,...

Dubby.  That was my grandma’s word for the feeling when you fall hard asleep in the afternoon and wake up feeling disoriented.  “I feel so dubby,” she would say after a nap.  My grandmother...

Collywobbles.  Those fuzzball things that appear in corners, under beds or chairs, next to the desk.  My mother called them collywobbles, though sometimes she referred to them as old men.  At my childhood neighbor’s...

You know how you’re thinking about someone and shortly afterwards the phone rings — or your email or text inbox dings — and it’s that person? It seems to me that the more I open...

I dreamed last night that someone mailed me a stack of receipts — from restaurants, theaters, all sorts of places we had gone. When I got them in the mail, in my dream I...

A stray cat recently took up residence in the crawl space under our front porch.  We asked around, looking for a possible owner and then did what common wisdom advises against:  I put food...