News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 151 - 175 of 252
It was a good party. Of course you would expect me to say that, since it was our going-away party and I am bound to be biased. But there were six dogs and plenty of food and lots of laughter and some tears and even a little barking and if that doesn’t qualify as a good party, I don’t know what does. Jake, the mixed-breed pup who showed up first, was pretty chill when the entire family of border collies showed up — all on leashes and looking like they owned the place. The b...
My husband, Peter, is looking around our empty living room. “I’ll always have good memories of this place.” “I will too,” I assure him. We are packing up the last of our possessions and heading across the country in a few days. We won’t be coming back. This is the home Peter bought as a single person, when he retired a bit early. He wasn’t sure how much he could afford, but he bought this condo in the town where his sister, Lori, lived, sight unseen. Lori drove by the house...
Tanner wasn’t waiting for me at the fence yesterday. Dakota and Tanner, my two oldest dogs, are always waiting for me at the chain-link fence. Dakota can’t hear and doesn’t see well, so she stays close to the fence in the afternoon when I walk by in order to collect her treat. Tanner really can’t see or hear at all, so he keeps close to Dakota. Yesterday he wasn’t there. The thing about giving out dog treats is that, even though I have a relationship with all these dogs, I d...
A cousin of mine reportedly said, “I can’t imagine living in a house where other people have lived!” I don’t know if she really said this, as I heard the story secondhand. But it stuck in my mind because every home I’ve owned has been lived in by other people, and a few people have died in them as well. So far, this has not bothered me in the least. I’m used to living in the homes of dead people. The first house I bought was owned by a woman named Ruby. She was still living th...
“Do you have time for this?” my husband, Peter, asked. Peter almost never questions what I’m doing unless I’m doing something particularly stupid. Yesterday, I had a meeting on Zoom. I figured I could finish my work, take my walk early, then run downtown and get my errands done all in time for my meeting. “Sure!” I assured him. Peter looked skeptical. “Maybe I’ll skip the stop at the hardware store,” I added, to pacify him. But the hardware store was right on the way, as I...
I just learned that my ex-husband has remarried. I learned this as we learn about all important life milestones these days: on Facebook. There were photos taken in the Caribbean. My ex-husband and his new bride were walking barefoot on the beach. She was carrying her shoes and their feet were wet and probably the most surprising thing to me was how sincerely I wished them well. It is common practice to offer our best wishes when we are actually wishing nothing of the kind....
The old wooden folding table belonged to my grandma. I don’t remember her ever using it. After she moved out of her house and into a retirement home, my sister inherited the table, but she didn’t use it much, either. The table has four wooden folding chairs that tuck beneath it and the whole thing rolls on casters. My husband, Peter, and I are moving to be closer to family and we don’t have a serviceable table for our new place. “Bring the folding table when you come,” I told...
Everyone knows that I am attached to my desk. I would argue I have good reason. My desk is an extension of myself. Whereas other people are attached to their phones, I frequently lose track of mine. (Just writing this made me wonder where it was. Don’t worry; I found it.) My desk is my home inside my home. I hear about people working from their couch or from their kitchen table or even from their bed and I cannot imagine it. My desk is always tidy. I always have fresh f...
Tanner and Dakota are waiting for me. They’re standing at the corner of their chain-link fence, watching the sidewalk. They know I’m coming, even if they don’t know exactly when, even if they can’t see the sidewalk very well and can’t hear at all. Tanner and Dakota are my two oldest dog customers, dogs I give treats to nearly every day. My husband, Peter, has decided against paying the big bucks for high-priced dog treats full of questionable ingredients. He bought himself a d...
It is a well-known fact that we are allowed to chew out the people we care about. Most recently, this came to mind when I gave my old friend, Andrew, a serious tongue-lashing. Andrew is a lifelong bachelor, and a committed curmudgeon. He is better than most curmudgeons at being curmudgeonly because he started young. Andrew showed signs of being a grumpy old man when he was still in his 30s. But Andrew is no longer in his 30s, and this is what brought us to our recent conflict....
I finished my bath and saw that the rust-orange towel had molted all over my body. I was covered with tufts of orange fur. It was not a good look, and it felt worse than it looked. Worse yet, it gave me a taste of what the next two months would be like. My husband, Peter, is a man of many systems, and I have learned to appreciate this over the six years we have been married. He has a particular way to do nearly everything, from making coffee, to washing the dishes, to...
The tree was lying on its side when I got to it. It was a nice-looking pine tree, fluffy and full and as tall as me. The strong winds coupled with some unstable footing had caused it to fall over. This seemed too sad to simply walk by. I went over to the tree and, with a little effort, got it standing upright again. It looked much happier. I finished my walk, feeling I had done my part. The next day, it was lying on its side again. I examined it more closely. It had been...
It’s amazing that anyone shares a bed. I know there are plenty of married and cohabiting couples who have separate beds, or even separate bedrooms, and I can see the logic in avoiding the snoring, the thrashing, the different sleep schedules, and the need to negotiate the complicated issue of bedding. But since marrying and moving into Peter’s house, we have shared a bed, and it is not a large one. So far, we have negotiated a peaceful settlement. This is because Peter has...
March is winding down and my sister-in-law, Lori, is going with it. There is too much food and too many flowers because that is what we do when someone is dying, when we don’t know what else to do as, gradually, the unthinkable becomes accepted and even ordinary. We make more food and bring more flowers. But there is too little time. There is always too little time. Lori is spending most of the time she has left sleeping, which means she is not in pain but also that no one c...
Throughout the past year, my husband, Peter, and I have been seeing no one except Peter’s sister, Lori, and her husband. Lori has Stage 4 cancer and has had a tough fight. She’s been on oxygen all this time. The decision of how careful we needed to be was easy. If we were going to see Lori, we had to be extremely careful. And as a reward, once a week we have heard Lori’s laughter. I’ve been writing fiction for the first time in my life. No one told me in advance that writing...
It’s our anniversary, and Peter and I will be celebrating, like everyone has this past year, the best we are able. We have not yet won the vaccine lottery. I recently received a note from the health department that basically said, “Don’t get your hopes up.” Newspaper columnists are not, apparently, considered essential workers and, of course, I am not. Meanwhile, we continue to visit my sister-in-law, Lori, whose health remains precarious. So our anniversary celebra...
I’ve never been a fan of March. March is supposedly spring, but we all know it’s not. In much of the country, more snow falls in March than any other month. But it doesn’t have the courtesy to stay. March snow falls, makes us shovel it, then turns into a sloppy mess in three days. It becomes slush, mixed with mud. The sky stays gray. And all the ... things (you know what I mean), things that were buried in previous snowfalls ... all those things come to light. Whatever they...
I know I am not the only one having travel fantasies. My husband, Peter, and I were not planning to do a lot of traveling in the past year. That was our plan, and we certainly made good on it. We didn’t realize at the time that “not a lot of traveling” would mean a bi-weekly trip to the grocery store. Like a lot of folks, we’ve been tracking how many months we’re getting on a gallon of gas. Now, however, traveling is sounding better all the time. My parents are also making tra...
I remember, a long time ago, when I used to have a social life. My husband, Peter, and I have been visiting his sister, Lori, once a week while she battles cancer. She was in yesterday for another radiation treatment, and we are waiting to hear if she will be feeling well enough for a visit this weekend. And so we stay home, as we have since March of last year. Lately, we have taken to picking up our groceries at the curb. I was skeptical. I’d never had another person c...
I am not exactly a connoisseur of contemporary culture. I haven’t seen the latest series on Netflix or anything else. I don’t follow Twitter or Snapchat or Instagram. But somehow, a TikTok phenomenon came to my attention that I found too delightful to ignore. Sea shanties are all the rage among Generation Z. “Sea shanties?” I thought. “That can’t be right.” But I checked it out and, yes, teens and young 20-somethings are singing sea shanties on TikTok, and listeners add...
My husband, Peter, is taking no chances. I knew this about him before I married him. Peter has a plan for everything and a plan in case the first plan doesn’t pan out. My father would call this “belt and suspenders” planning. Peter’s been walking around in a belt and suspenders ever since I’ve known him. Peter’s planning has made surviving the pandemic a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. We never run out of anything. That might sound impossible, but it’s almost...
A friend of mine told me something so amazing, I had to look it up to see if it was true. In 1960, a series of experiments were done with flatworms in which a bunch of flatworms were taught where to find food. This was news all on its own, as the flatworm is not a species known for its scholastic aptitude. But that wasn’t the interesting part. It got interesting when the educated flatworms were ground up and fed to flatworms who had no idea where the food was and, miraculously...
I don’t remember exactly when I took to living in stretch pants full time. The process was gradual, I’m sure of that. I started out wearing a pair of bell-bottom stretch pants when I was writing. I didn’t actually live in them; they were part of my writing costume and they were comfy. But as the pandemic wore on, I noticed the legs of my stretch pants were getting longer and longer until, one day, I saw they were covering my feet, and it was not a very respectable look. “I ne...
Dax stared at me in disbelief. I am the Treat Lady, and I had no treats. It was inexplicable. Dax is one of my regular customers. He is a young black dog with a lot of energy. His sister, Zia, is a little older and has the uncanny ability to find me with or without her owner anywhere in the vicinity. On this particular day, Dax was with his owner on a run and he was beside himself to suddenly encounter the Treat Lady, without even the help of his resourceful sister. Dax was ov...
My 2021 calendar is hanging from the closet door. Every year I’ve lived in this house, I’ve gotten a cloth calendar, hung from a dowel. My mother’s mother always had a cloth calendar hanging in the farmhouse kitchen. As soon as the year was over, the calendar would be conscripted into use, usually to cover cinnamon rolls as they rose, to keep them moist until they were large enough to put into the oven. Arriving at the farmhouse and seeing “1963” covering a pile of soon-to-b...
