Earlier this week, a Facebook friend of mine posted a meme about “normalizing” things. It left me rather puzzled. Who waits for things to be normal to do them? Who wants to do normal things? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain desirable security in some mundanity, but, as Oscar Wilde put it, “all things in moderation, including moderation.” And […]

“They’ll never want to see a rake or plow And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow? How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, After they’ve seen Paree?” wrote Misters Donaldson, Young, and Lewis in 1919. After this whole lockdown shindig, complete with stay-at-home orders, I know I’m not the only one who was going stir crazy. My […]

It seems like just yesterday that Darling Hubby and I fell in love with our house. We knew it would soon be offered for sale, and we just had to have it. While we waited for the previous owner to be ready, we fixed up our house in the big city and started to make our plans. Dear readers, we […]

You just cannot make this stuff up. Up until recently, I had thought I was pretty good at adapting to rapid changes, even fairly adept at learning on the fly. Apparently I have quite a bit of room for improvement. Simply comparing today to even the not so recent past seems not just like comparing apples and oranges, but apples […]

What a week it’s been. Daylight Savings Time, Friday the thirteenth, and Spring Break beginning, to say nothing of Coronavirus and all of its attendant mayhem. My social media has been overrun with constant updates of new cases, new guidelines from state and federal health departments, and endless photos of empty shelves around the nation. Still, I’m thankful on many […]

Long, long ago in a land far, far away, a wizened old man lived alone in a little cottage on the moor. Some of the locals whispered that he was a wizard, but he himself would be the first to tell you otherwise. He just preferred his own company, and the visits of the local wildlife, to the hubbub of […]

If you had to describe yourself to someone else, how would you do it? Would you describe your looks, your heritage, your political leanings? Or would you strive more to describe who you are inside your skin, what makes you tick? Sometimes it’s hard to describe our true feelings and initiatives, to put those amorphous ideas into concrete words. But […]

“Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” Well, of course the mice weren’t stirring. We didn’t have any. My mother was very proud of running a tight ship during my childhood, and mice simply weren’t tolerated. Plus, there was the fact that we lived in town, which in […]

I turn my SUV into the pasture and follow the hedgerow to the back. The cloud of limestone dust rolls lazily down the road as I pull up near hubby’s truck. I open the door and swing down into the tall grass and start walking. The dry grass crunches beneath my feet as I approach the bent figure chainsawing through […]

Kid, petting the cat: “This kitten has fur growing between his toes. Why does he have fur between his toes? The other cats don’t have that.” Me: “I don’t know, but I do know that it has a name. Do you know what they call that toe fur?” Kid: “What do you mean it has a name? Why would toe […]