Celebrating Labor Day, first Monday in September
Happy Labor Day! It’s a gorgeous day here at Vanaprastha, clear, warm and breezy, shirt-sleeve weather. Unlike other parts of the country affected by Hurricane Ida, we received a welcome three inches of rain then a cool front last week. But our summer garden is...
Not so terribly strange to be seventy
Over the weekend, I turned seventy. As I pondered the beginning of my eighth decade, Paul Simon’s lyric “How terribly strange to be seventy” played in my head. It's not the first time his songs from the 60s have colored my memories of adolescence. Or that I’ve...
Teach me your way, that I may walk in your truth
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; -Psalm 86:11a “I’m reading Joanna Weaver’s Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World, thinking about how people teach truth, and remembering my mother,” I said to my friend. We were enjoying our usual Friday...
But was my story true, is memory the truth?
Was any part of my memory true? Ten years ago, I wrote about memories of the day a fast-moving snow storm dumped several inches of snow on southern Connecticut—before Halloween. I was in high school at the time. In the middle of the day, school administrators made...
Where do you come from—geography, faith, source
From: a starting point “Where do you come from?” Meaning geography. A common question when getting to know someone new. My answer: “I grew up in Connecticut, and my parents were from northern Maine.” Both sets of grandparents were potato farmers—below/right is my...
Wife, daughter, self – it’s about relationships
At church yesterday—in the visiting time after morning rehearsal and before the service began—for some reason, I caught myself thinking about relationships and Beth Kephart’s Wife, Daughter, Self: A Memoir in Essays. The book sections into...