A Perfect September Day in the Indiana Countryside
Oh how I feel like myself again this morning, readying photos for this post! Feels good. Finally, I am blogging again. And blogging, despite its airy quality, is amazingly grounding for me. Slowly, slowly, I am arriving in my own life again, namely in my routine, rather than living the whirlwind of home repair, festivities, holidays, socializing and kids [...]
My Ode to Kol Nidre
Chicago Loop Synagogue Window Detail ...was published yesterday in Tablet Magazine: Kol Nidre Showed Me... Meanwhile I am looking forward Yom Kippur and am basking, just a little bit, in all the sweet comments I have received from friends and acquaintances in response to the essay. When someone tells me the essay brought a tear to his eye - what [...]
My 9/11 Tribute
Thanks to doing my Morning Pages, as soon as I wrote out the date this morning, it hit me what day it was: 9/11, and thanks to my ritual of consulting Portraits 9/11/01 on this day, I also knew how I would commemorate this sad anniversary. Contrary to its omission of the 9/11 anniversary last year, today's Wall Street Journal's [...]
When in Boston, Make Way for Ducklings
The Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in the Public Garden in Boston, created by Nancy Schön Oh, the power of fiction! Especially children's fiction! It had my kids and me retracing the steps of Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings from the picture book Make Way for Ducklings as soon as we arrived in Boston last week, even though my kids are teenagers [...]
How I Found a Most Meaningful Book
Sometimes it is interesting to retrace where something began, when a meaningful connection was made. My interview with Susannah Conway appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books last week, and I've been thinking about when I first discovered her and her work. Was serendipity at play? It all goes back to my browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookstore while [...]
A Trip to Bishop Hill (2)
Spinning wheel at the Steeple Building, Bishop Hill, Illinois On our visit to Bishop Hill, my friend Barbara and I spent a considerable amount of time in the Steeple Building, built in 1854 and planned as a hotel for the colony. It ended up serving various other purposes, among them a school for children. These days it houses the Bishop [...]