In 2011 a strange series of events and meetings brough my family to lunch at the home of John and Lady Carolyn Warren on the Highclere Estate in England, the estate where sits the castle of “Downton Abbey.”  Lady Carolyn is the sister of the current Lord Carnarvon.  Carolyn...

As executor of my mother’s will, I meticulously set about distributing her possessions to my sister and children.  I made a catalogue of everything she owned and circulated it so that each in turn could make his or her choices as mom’s legal document specified.  After that,...

Every so often I feel the irresistible urge to purge.  Not in the way that some people do a cleanse for dietary purposes.  I purge my belongings.  I have to!  I find myself amassing things at an alarming rate.  Some of my recent acquisitions come from inheritances from my...

I’m a summer gardener. The area around our lake cottage is lush from storms and thick humidity. It’s the opposite of arid Southern California, where we live the rest of the year.  In Michigan, I rarely need to water anything but my window boxes dressed in their annual color....

This week I’ve done a lot of driving.  I drove from Michigan to Nashville, on a book promotional journey to MomCon.  Once back in Epworth I drove to the airport and back to pick up my husband who flew in to help me close cottages and drive back across the country.  We left...

They say hindsight is twenty-twenty.  I’m not sure it is quite that sharp, but with time we do gain some clarity.  MomCon in Nashville didn’t bear the huge sales that we had hoped for.  Mom’s “off the leash” seem to buy more jewelry than books.  ...

On Monday my daughter Meredith and I began our trek to Nashville, Tennessee.  Back in the spring, she had asked me if I would go with her to MomCon, a convention hosted by MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) and manage a booth to sell her book.  At the time I had received my second COVID...

This ain’t Ararat!
This weather-worn, dilapidated shed
that’s seen better, but not much better days.

And this tub is no Ark,
this boat perched precariously on a rooftop.
“Keep Off” says the sign on the wall,
but boats don’t read.

What flood of tears lifted you
to such...

The freshness of the orb
as I pop it in my mouth,
an explosion of blue juice
running down my chin,
staining fingers as they pick
and plop them into buckets:
one for the berry pail,
one on my tongue,
the promise of pies and
muffins and stacks of flapjacks
can wait as I gobble them
fresh off the...

From every window of my house
I can see water.  Lake and river surround me. 
I lie down in the green grass, but

the water isn’t always still.  Sometimes
it rages, and flimsy barriers of glass
and clapboard restrain the tempest’s damage.
The storms within the house are harder...