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Owner Surrenders – A Shelter Animal Article
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16 year old owner surrender. Who does that ? It’s tempting to leave it at that question with all the disdain and judgement it conjures up. In our ‘holier than thou’ minds we see some callous Scrooge like character gather this bundle of tired bones and drop it on the shelter doorstep, no backward…
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Teach Your Children Well
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Tree frogs start their summer evening songs in the scented boxwoods and lilacs and assorted bee attracting foliage that shade our leisure evening view over the children running and playing on the green fields of their country club bubble. We’re talking about them. As usual. Do moms talk about anything else? “It goes so…
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You Suck at Basketball – Kids Say Stuff and How to Counter it.
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Sitting by the pool, a friend and I were watching our boys somersaulting off the diving board when she mentioned – “A friend of Ryan (not his real name) has been telling him: ‘You suck at basketball’ and this has hurt his feelings. I’m not really sure what to do about it.” Innocuous…
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Just One Thing
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I sat down at a table next to a woman in Starbucks, head buried in her computer, tapping away furiously. On a second glance I recognized her as an acquaintance. She looked up and we exchanged pleasantries. Not that she felt much like casual small talk. “I’ve just quit my job that I hate…
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Shot At Dawn: In Flanders fields the poppies blow
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In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row ……… They blew in May 1915 when Canadian army doctor, John McCrae, wrote these immortal lines. They blow today. Colorful memorials of a war-torn world entrenched in the bloody, muddy fields of France and Flanders. On route to the World War 1 battle…
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In Your Grief – Thoughts on a Sudden Death
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Let the flowers die unwatered in their vases. Flowers? Yes, they are there. Someone needed to do something. Accept them graciously. Or not. God knows this is bleak, unchartered territory for you ….. You with this gaping hole, groping around in the dark. Sleepwalking. If sleep would only come and the fog dim for…
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This Adult Coloring Thing
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Three of the top ten books on Amazon’s best selling list are adult coloring books. I am not sure whether to be appalled at the dumbing down of the American intellect or amused at our attempts to escape the stress our children cause us by immersing ourselves in one of their activities. Every day…
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You Can’t Parent Happy
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Welcome to the age of parenting in a world that is supercharged with agendas, celebrates success regardless of merit and fast tracks early front runners, deserving or not. My friends and I lament the state we find ourselves in. We are caught in a riptide of super-competitive parenting, a race to create mini-moguls and…
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A Big, Bold Blessing Bag Plan
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Synchronicity (what a beautiful word) is the extraordinary concept of the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that can’t be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer. CNN recently covered it in an article titled, The Other Side : Where do coincidences come from. An…
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El Niño Simplified
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We have heard much about El Niño recently – the much maligned phenomenon responsible for some record warm Christmases from New York to Atlanta on the US East coast. “El Niño is wreaking havoc with our weather” is an ice-breaker (ha ha) from water cooler to cocktail hour across the country. It is also responsible…
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A Response : The Thing All Women Do That You Don’t Know About
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Read my Response to the Huffington Post article – “The Thing All Women Do That You Don’t Know About”. Way to grab attention with a headline! It’s a good one and I click, wondering: what do I, and all women do, that men don’t know about? The author writes wonderfully well. She is clear,…
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Christmas Presents
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What shall I buy for Christmas ? What I remember of Christmas mornings as a child is the tree, or more to the point, all the presents under the tree. My family was not wealthy, but we had enough, and my mother (perhaps owing to her own difficult and deprived childhood) made sure we…
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Africa Does Not Exist Anywhere Else
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Africa does not exist anywhere else. You can look at pictures and hear stories but it’s not there. It’s not in the smell of rain on your dusty foothills, though that smell is as synonymous with Africa as any. It’s not in the sound of waves crashing on your craggy coastline – the water…
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Looking at History
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The world’s stage beckons. Sometimes the odds are stacked in our favor, a glittering temple of ambition achieved, enemies vanquished and life preserved. Sometimes – stage right – sirens blare and neon warnings blink and airplanes hover, bomb, hurtle to the moon, Mars, the depths of the Indian Ocean …… The future is bright,…
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Home Is Where the Hearth Is
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Many, many years ago I attended a work function one winter evening at a destination I can’t remember in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa. We walked into this large, open room. It was sparsely decorated, cold high ceilings and dimly lit by candlelight and fire. The massive, stone Medieval-looking fireplace was an…