Today is the Yahrzeit – the anniversary — of my sister Lorraine’s death. She died 24 years ago, just two weeks before the 9/11 disaster that she did not live to see, small compensation for the tragic loss for her husband, her two sons and me. She was five and a half years older than me, a large enough gap to preclude real closeness, despite the awkwardness of having shared a bedroom until...

The story I’m about to tell will have elements familiar to many of you, but it’s a tale worth telling if it might spare someone the pain that we barely skirted. On the day after we arrived in New Hampshire for our annual revisit – the subject of another blog to come – we received a troubling notification from Amazon that there were suspicious charges on our account that they are looking into for...

(Note: We are heading to New Hampshire this week for the 43rd consecutive summer, minus the Covid year, since we left New England for Houston. It’s inconvenient to post from there for technical reasons, so you won’t hear from me for a couple of weeks. Enjoy this precious summer month. We’ll see you on the other side.) First, unrelated to the subject of today’s posting, I want to report a random...

The two poles of what I loosely call my creativity these days are my garden and my blog. On rare occasions like today they come in conflict with each other. I was eager to start my blog for next week, but the brutal temperatures indicated that I had to first deal with watering while the conditions were still tolerable. Now I’m back at the computer and ready to roll. Rosellen and I were so moved...

The other night, in that final moment of clarity before drifting into hypnagogia, I said to Rosellen, “I don’t think I say I love you often enough.” I’m not sure what impelled me to say it at that moment, but there was definitely a touch of fear that I might not wake up the next morning. I’m writing this two days before my 86th birthday, a point in my life when thoughts like that are increasingly...