My best writing happens when I manage to package my own experience, habits or insights into an article that might bring inspiration to others. Sometimes, my own life is too [...]
A month ago I was suffering from a broken heart (being a mother is hard...), and I found myself opening this cross stitch kit I'd ordered back in May [...]
Today is 9/11. Somehow it strikes me as odd to remember that day in the middle of a new calamity. The COVID-19 pandemic certainly is a different calamity altogether. I'm [...]
This summer, I finally had to give you up. I embarked on my trip to Peru with a new version of you, Just as comfortable and snug, but water tight. [...]
Lately, I have been taken with books by young female dynamos: Tami Lahren's Never Play Dead captivated me in August, and now I have a new one to share: Girl, [...]
Wedding picture in my book A book is a connector. That's one of the surprising things I learned after Jumping Over Shadows came out in April 2017. But now it's [...]
Farewell old fridge, and thanks for your service! I have to admit: My heart sank when the delivery guys carried out our old fridge. After serving us faithfully for 24 [...]
Postcard carousel in the colonnade at Mariánské Lázně, Czech Republic (September 2016) Whenever I travel, I send postcards to my brother and sister. They do the same. This [...]
One evening last summer, my brother and I lingered by the camp fire after the rest of the family had gone to bed. As the flames died down, we looked [...]
Yesterday I went for a walk around Promontory Point for the first time since my surgery, and I realized: a place can help restore our sense of self. Three months [...]
I always knit when I'm on a plane, or crochet. In fact, if I have a flight coming up, and I don't have a knitting project going, I frantically cast [...]
I have blogged before about the special magic of handwritten letters and postcards. But now that I am recovering from hip surgery and have been largely housebound, I discovered just how [...]
At our grandparents' grave - my sister, my brother and I Summer is the time of family reunions. Incidentally, just before my hip surgery, we had a family [...]
Yours truly visiting the Ice Palace in St. Paul, MN Sunday, January 28, 2018 Inspired by a prompt in the current winter issue of Bella Grace, I kept [...]
I can't believe I'm about to write a blog post advocating going to the store. I am not much of a shopper. I quickly get mental overload at any kind [...]
Today I'm picking up the practice of creating a time capsule of one ordinary day, namely December 12, begun back on 12/12/12 when that was simply one cool date. I [...]
With my brother-in-law's recent death, the topic of dealing with all the things the deceased leave behind has become center stage again for my husband and me. Incidentally, just prior [...]
My daughter wearing one of the hats I knitted for her after I learned to read American knitting patterns. I just began a new knitting project the other day--a hat [...]
It's been my custom to commemorate 9/11 by taking my Portraits 9/11/01 off the shelf and opening it at random to read some of the obituaries the New York Times so admirably [...]
...visit the Montfort Castle in northern Israel. As my contribution to the Field Guide to Everyday Magic Blog Hop, I'm sharing how I finally did so because I have found [...]
I adore snail mail art. As a kid, I loved to draw. That pastime, along with several others, has remained in my childhood. Over the past few years, however, I've [...]
I have a new favorite winter pastime: Sitting in the sun. I've discovered that from about 9:15 in the morning until about 10 o'clock the sun, when it is out, [...]
Today is St. Nikolaus, a day I remember fondly from my childhood (see my essay Giving Up Christmas in Tablet, which, incidentally, is an excerpt from my book Jumping Over Shadows.) [...]
One of my longtime memoir workshop students, David Thoele, MD, is a pediatric cardiologist, but he also serves as the Director of Narrative Medicine at Advocate Children's Hospital because he [...]
Yesterday morning I had occasion to walk around the downtown Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville where I used to work eight years ago. It's always interesting to see how much it [...]
{August Break 8/31: August was...} ...long! And not as peaceful as this photo, taken from the Rogers Park beach pier on the northside of Chicago. But there were peaceful moments, [...]
Canyonlands National Park, Utah {August Break 8/18: 5 Years Ago} Five years ago I was taking a road trip with my family: five weeks, Chicago to California and back. It [...]
Today I'm taking a break from the daily August Break topics because today's is "secret," and I just don't feel like I have anything good to share here. Unless, of [...]
Today is the birthday of a former friend. Some dates are seared into my memory, and this is one of them. Perhaps because this friendship reached the furthest back in [...]
Today I found out by happenstance, via Facebook, that a friend of mine passed away. We weren't close friends or I would have known that her battle with cancer had [...]
My laptop died a week ago. It was six years old, and I can't really blame the thing. It held up pretty well being logged around the world. Nevertheless, I have [...]
Whenever something horrible happens like the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris this past Friday, I ask myself, there must be something to set against all this. This is a line [...]
Every year, to commemorate 9/11, I take my Portraits 9/11/01 off the shelf and open it at random to read some of the obituaries the New York Times collected so [...]
Learning a new language means frantically running around in my mind snatching at the coat tails of words I might now, hoping to catch a consonant-vowel combination that hopefully means [...]
I have often have to remind myself that eventually, it all gets done. Such as sewing that button onto my son's polo shirt. It's an old Lacoste he inherited from [...]
You might remember my blog post from last summer, Recipe for a Perfect Day on the Porch. Well, I'm happy to announce that it made it into the summer issue [...]
I just had to share this: My 17-year-old son gave me this for Mother's Day--a tiny rose he crafted from tin and copper, propped into the cutest little vase, namely [...]
Today is... ... the undulating blue of the mountains against the bright of the sky ... the dusting of snow on the summits ... the road swinging up the [...]
I am keeping with my tradition of creating a time capsule of the 12th of December, begun as a project on 12/12/12. One day, way in the future, it might [...]
Why, I ask myself, is it so hard to say good-bye to an old pot? I know why, actually, but I still keep mulling over it because it strikes me [...]
My photo essay "Capture Magic that Hangs by a Gossamer Thread" appears in the winter 2015 issue of Bella Grace magazine, on sale as of today, December 1. Last [...]
Dalya Lemkus - May soon her family be able to look at her picture without crying. Sometimes all I can do to come to grips with a terrible [...]
The sound of fall: Walking through leaves October went out with a bang here in Chicago; we had such a mighty storm that the waves were swapping over and Lake [...]
For October I've given myself the challenge of going for at least a 20-minute walk every day. This is part of me digging deeper into Julia Cameron's book The [...]
For my generation, today's date will live in infamy. It will simply never again be another day. 9/11 will always make me shiver, and I will always have second thoughts [...]
The capturing of this recipe was inspired by Bella Grace and is my contribution to the Bella Grace Blog Hop. Essential: 1 porch 1 summer day, temperatures in the 70s, [...]
I'm rerunning my six-word Dad memoir from three years ago, that sadly will always be true because, even 29 years after he died, the tears can still creep up [...]
I've been in a blogging slump, and I figure it's better to admit that than to publish lackluster posts. There are books I want to write about, photo essays I want [...]
