Following his first cross-country practice at his new school, my son had to report for an “imPACT” evaluation. The name comes from “Immediate Post Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing” and it’s now used widely in schools, apparently to see how…
A couple of mornings ago, my daughter asked me to scramble her some eggs without the yolks. She had just had her wisdom teeth taken out, and hunger was beating at her door. But she was not too groggy that…
It may be a quiet summer in some places; down at our pond, though, two frogs have been really going at it. Vocally, I mean. They’re on opposite sides of the water, and—at least just about every time I go…
I had more or less gotten over the fact that I was not Joan of Arc, riding boldly on a horse smack into battle, when I discovered that my name—something that I had heretofore thought had distinguished me, at least…
I’ve gone months, even years, without giving ol’ Joan of Arc much thought, but then there she was astride her horse in the center of a glorious garden bearing her name on the edge of the Plains of Abraham in…
Do you think life is essentially made up of particular moments, like grains of sand that you can feel, grainy to the touch; or is it more about patches of days or even great swaths of years that bring about…
It used to be that you could put things in different compartments and they would stay there, divided from one another in their own individual boxes. Nowadays, however— and this isn’t just in my house, either—certain things are getting mixed…
It was just about exactly a year ago that I drove my son and a carload of stuff down to register for Harvard Summer School. While in the parking search that is a perennial part of visiting there, we came…
I remember once when I drove my sister-in-law to the airport, she got flummoxed with the overhead signs as we were coming in and thought we should get in the “Arriving” instead of the “Departing” lane. When I resisted, she…
Whoever said that Mud Season in New England goes from this time to that time and then is over definitely never lived here…or at least not near our back field. It was soaked when we arrived about a year ago,…