News you can use
News you can use
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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...
This week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a strange time, a time when every day feels like Sunday. This morning, I made a big mistake. I checked the temperature. At 10:00 it was 42! That means in the coldest hour of the early morning, it was near freezing. How can that be? It didn’t feel that cold when I walked out to my bodega. I wasn’t cold until I looked at the thermometer on the outer wall. My ceramic heater is swiveling back and forth, the setting on Hi. I’m n...
A fellow I know was grousing about the past year. His birthday was coming up and he felt, once again, that this year failed to meet his expectations. He was unhappy with the year, unhappy with himself, unhappy with the fact that he’d even allowed himself to hope that 2020, of all years, was going to be better than the previous ones. “My caring isn’t going to make any difference in how things work out,” he told me. “When I step back to accept that reality, maybe I’ll stop...
Whatever you think about Christmas, I think you would have to agree we need one this year. Everyone I know seems determined to do as much Christmas as it is possible to do. My pastor announced at the beginning of Advent that we were going to have 26 consecutive Zoom Advent services. “We’re having 15 minutes of Advent reflections EVERY night!” she announced. “Surely she means every week,” most of the congregation thought. “EVERY night!” she repeated for clarification...
“I’ve forgotten the funny name of the tree you helped us pick out,” my mother said. “Our tree this year is named Melinda.” The greenhouse where my parents get their Christmas tree every year has festive tags hanging from the trees with their names and prices. These are not inexpensive trees, so it’s fitting they are all individually christened. My mother likes to support this local business — and they do have nice trees. “Caleb. The tree I picked out with you was named Caleb...
It is a year of lower expectations. Every year, there is a chorus of folks urging us to lower our expectations for the holidays — buy less, consume less, worry less about having a picture-perfect holiday, and spend more time reflecting on what the holiday means to us. This year, it seems, we will finally get a chance to do that. I was recently asked what my childhood memories of the holidays were, and I had a couple of vivid ones. I saw myself sitting on the wooden stairway o...
My friend Anita is felting up a storm. Philip is cooking something new and posting a photo of it every day. Megan is reading Shakespeare on video, Jason is doing woodwork projects, Tom and Mary and Katie are sewing thousands of masks, and Peggy is studying Spanish, German and Latin — all at once. Then there are the folks who are just trying to make it through the week, working jobs that demand more and more of them every day. There is no right way to do this. I decided to p...
I have always loved Thanksgiving. I love that it is a holiday built around a full table and homemade treats. I love the recipes handed down on index cards that only get made once a year and traditions that bring back childhood memories and the chance to use linen napkins and the idea that sitting around a table — just sitting around a table — is reason enough to celebrate. I think it might be my favorite holiday. I like that expectations are reasonably low and yet the hol...
“I’m going to bake bread!” my husband, Peter, announced. Inwardly, I said, “Oh, no.” Baking bread is not easy — until it is. Every person I know who bakes bread will agree. If there’s someone out there who tried baking bread for the first time and it was a great success, I would like to hear about it because, in my experience, you have to bake a lot of bad bread before you bake anything close to edible. I was afraid Peter was about to find this out. But what I said was, “Gr...
I am a celebrity among the neighborhood dogs. By now, I have been giving out dog treats on my daily walk for several months. If you think this has gone unnoticed among my town's dog population, you would be very much mistaken. If Gwyneth Paltrow or Brad Pitt were to walk down the street, I am quite certain the dogs in my town would be completely unimpressed. Their owners might behave foolishly and start jumping up and down and salivating, but for the dogs, it would be a...
This has been a year that defies explanations. I spoke with my parents a week or so ago. We have used Zoom and other types of video to communicate but, more often than not, I just call up my dad, he puts me on speaker, and we chat as we always have. My parents were about to go skiing. They live in the north, but they don’t live on the North Pole. It was much too early to cross-country ski, but they’d had an early snow and my mom decided they should give it a try. “You know...
It's the season for all things scary, and I found myself wondering how many people are actually looking for more things to frighten them this year. There is a new horror movie about Zoom that is supposed to be terrific ... and I won't be watching it. I've never been a fan of horror movies. On the very few occasions I've tried to watch a scary movie, I end up both covering my eyes and plugging my ears (the ominous music is the worst part of it) and I emerge with a pretty...
“I’m hunkering down,” Rebecca told me. I know what she means. My friend Rebecca just returned from a road trip she made after a lot of careful consideration. First, her mother was sick. Then, she fell and broke her hip. Rebecca’s mother is 90 and she did not seem to be getting better. Rebecca decided she needed to go visit her. Rebecca and her daughter drove across three states for the visit. Rebecca said it was a wonderful trip and she bonded with her daughter as never b...
Today I will get Blue again. Blue is the anxious Italian mastiff that I dog-sit on Wednesdays while his owner, Bill, works in the office. The new procedure is that I walk down to Bill’s house, fetch Blue, and bring him back to my home. This seems to work better than having Bill drop him off. When Bill does that, Blue hangs onto Bill’s legs and tries to avoid coming in my house like a petulant 4-year-old trying to avoid day care — which is exactly what he is. When I go to Bl...
I get stomachaches. I get them with regularity and always have. “It’s just gas!” my mother says, and, of course, she’s right. My mother tells me I get stomachaches because I have the “Benson stomach,” by which she means that I have the same stomach she has, which is the same stomach her mother had, which my grandmother inherited from her mother — who was a Benson. It seems a little sad that the only time the Benson family comes to mind is when I have a stomachache....
Yesterday, I had a nice long Zoom chat with an old friend. I know this is nothing remarkable these days, but it was the first time my friend Andrew had used Zoom and I was frankly a little surprised. Andrew isn’t on Facebook. “It’s none of anyone’s business what I’m up to!” he tells me. I don’t think Andrew is “up to” all that much, but he takes a particularly fierce view on privacy. He won’t buy groceries with his credit card if they are going to track what he buys. “Why...
My husband, Peter, is now at war with the mice. The mice (possibly with the assistance of a rat or two) have eaten the electrical wiring in our car, causing extensive damage. The coating on the wires is apparently tasty. I don't know any automobile engineers personally but, if I did, I would suggest that constructing a car out of tasty materials is probably not a great idea because now we have a lot of small creatures trying to eat our car, one piece at a time. We are not...
Blue had been through a rough patch. He was adopted from the shelter and then returned for unspecified reasons. That’s when Bill met him. Blue is an Italian mastiff — which means he is massive, just not quite as massive as an ordinary mastiff. I don’t know exactly what attracted Bill to Blue, but it’s not hard to understand. Blue is a very sweet boy. But he’d been through a lot. Bill is still working from home most days, but he’s been going in on Wednesdays and that’s what...
Yesterday, I bought gladiolas. They are nearly three feet tall and bright fuchsia. It is safe to say they are the most exciting thing to appear at my desk in ages. When I walked in the front door, my husband, Peter, said, “Oh my gosh.” Translated, that means: “You have gone overboard on the flowers.” But Peter is too nice to say that. I always have flowers on my desk. I used to feel guilty, spending good money on flowers every week. It seemed to me it was a little frivolo...
They were on trail bikes and saw the bear in the direction I was headed. “It was scary!” one of the women said. We were all a little nervous. There had been a bear attack just a few weeks earlier up on the ski hill. A couple had gone up to see the comet. They didn’t bring food. There were no bear cubs. There was no reason to think they were in any danger. They were just sitting and watching the sky when a bear attacked, seriously injuring the woman. Their dog ran away, and f...
I’ve been reading to Lori. Lori is my husband, Peter’s, older sister. She has cancer and has been battling it for a while now. She uses oxygen to help out and catching this virus would be terrible for her, so Peter and I are extra careful, in large part because I’d like to keep reading to Lori. I’ve been writing a novel. It’s the first time I’ve written fiction, so I honestly don’t have any idea what I’m doing. It’s the sort of thing a person learns how to do by doing — and so...
It seems I have acquired a reputation. I have been handing out dog treats for three months. Every day, I take the same trail and every day, I meet many of the same customers. Dogs have an amazing memory when it comes to getting a treat — particularly from a stranger. One dog is not allowed treats. “No treats!” his owner says. Before I knew her better, I suggested, “Maybe he’d like a treat?” “Wouldn’t we all?!” she said. That lady sounded like she could really use a trea...
