Hiking up Mount Osceola—one of the 4,000 footers in the White Mountains—last weekend with friends, I noticed that there were about equal numbers of men and women. We were all in our layers, climbing over the rocks, getting glimpses of…
The Pope has come and gone, with countless people either seeing him for real –including two of my very best friends –or wondering what’s he’s about; we’ve watched the moon get enveloped in a red shadow and then learned that…
Today we’re going to look closely at two terms with an almost automatic heartwarming quality: FAMILY and FOOD. Ah yes, I know, your whole inner being is already feeling the glow…there’s a big table, smiles and laughter, glasses clinking, sharing…
“What brought y’all down to Alabama?” the coffee seller on a Montgomery street corner asked, as friendly as she could be. We paused. It wasn’t so easy to explain to a welcoming Southerner that we were a group from New…
Life can, it seems to me, be divided up roughly into “Getting Things Done in a Linear Fashion,” “Getting Things Done in a Circular Fashion,” “Not Getting Things Done,” “Just Going Back and Forth,” and finally “The Hell With It.”…
Driving back from early evening tennis a few towns over, I saw the sun hanging low over the rolling New Hampshire fields—still glorious, as if darkness weren’t right on its heels. Going to the pond would mean taking a significant…
“Look at that…just miles and miles of emptiness!” “But Mom, what we’re seeing is not empty at all…it’s full-up with Nature.” This is, more or less, how a bit of conversation between my older son and me went as we…
Each time I dive in again here, I remind myself that my theme is contrasts…things that are next to each other but strikingly different. Life is a lot about merging, but those lines of demarcation are everywhere, too. Take, for…
Did you hear about the recent U.S. Religious Landscape Study? The people at the Pew Research Center have been busy bees, publishing the results of their new survey just as—around our homes— the flowers are blooming, the vegetable plants are…
It’s funny sometimes, isn’t it, how a task that might at first seem like just another chore to complete on a long list of others becomes more than that, takes on a certain depth and fullness, even gives new life?…