the beauty of an ordinary life
My mother's parents were farmers, and their farm had everything from peanuts to peaches. They also had blackberry bushes, the harvest of which was my mother's least favorite activity. My mother had fragile alabaster skin, and walking through the blackberry brush left her looking like she'd rolled in a barbed wire fence. At least, that's … Continue reading Blackberry summer.
My sister and I stifled laughter throughout our mother’s funeral. The minister was not trying to be funny. He had scarcely known our mother because she did not like him or his newfangled church policies. At her service he retold stories we’d told him only 48 hours before, and in his folksy manner he inadvertently … Continue reading Laying Betty to rest.
Growing up in a house with a little sister, a stay-at-home, bridge-playing, sewing-club mom and a working dad whose only athletic interest was watching the occasional college football game, I learned only the sports in which our family participated: hide-and-go-seek, climbing on a swing set and pancake flipping. Sports were for boys, and until I … Continue reading Love of the game.
I spent the summer of 1989 in Orleans, a lovely town on the Cape, living in a house that was built in the 1600s and that sported, among many other fine amenities, a real victory garden that dated back to World War II. The garden was planted when the family who owned the house moved … Continue reading Victory gardens. (weekly menu 5.6.13)
When my son was not quite two and I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a client whose focus was building community awareness of the importance of early childhood development. As the hired PR help, I was the group's first disciple. I read Ghosts from the Nursery and Neurons to Neighborhoods and countless research … Continue reading Who we become.
It is time to divulge a secret about myself that very few people know: I'm a math geek. Not a Rainman, slay-the-tables-in-Vegas math geek, just a place-out-of-freshman-math-at-Princeton math geek. My dad was a math geek, and we used to have fun making up goofy algebra problems for no good reason other than to entertain ourselves. … Continue reading Order of operations.
"Tell us about when we were little," my children said at dinner recently. Like most children they love hearing about the funny things they did in their early years. Having photographed so many moments of their lives, I'm the one they see as family storyteller. This particular evening, however, the story well was dry. I … Continue reading I’m Batman.
"You get what you get, and you don't throw a fit," a friend frequently tells her children. At issue is usually red popsicle vs. purple, or something similarly unimportant. These behavioral guidelines are on my mind today as I think about my friend Elizabeth, whose inspiring story was published in our local paper this morning. … Continue reading Choose wisely.
jenny's lark 