Every six months Franny rearranges the furniture in her home. “Just moving the couch from one wall to another can change the whole feel of a room!” she exclaims. “The change in energy makes me more creative, invigorated, and ready to face any challenge.” Franny’s is just one example of how your environment reflects your identity. A business major in…
March blew out with surrender. There was that day I drove home from the beach, drinking as usual. But then, a moment of clarity. Noticing how fast “just one” became six at 60 mph, I saw myself as I was: an alcoholic. Funny, after 35 years of “problem drinking,” in the end it was one lousy six-pack that did me…
A world without water is impossible to imagine because…well, because we wouldn’t be here to imagine it. Water is essential to the existence of every living thing. It hydrates. Cleans. Purifies. Calms. Invigorates. You can swim in it, soak in it, float on it…even skate away on it when the temperature allows. It’s no wonder that water has so many…
I met Steve some seven years ago when I hired his company to do some work in my home. There was an instant connection. We seemed to relate to life in the same way and at times would find ourselves deep in conversation about the true meaning of life. When you spend a lot of time at someone’s home, you…
I came into this life stuttering. My mother had three false alarms on three consecutive days. On the fourth trip to the hospital, my father said he wasn’t going back home again. Once admitted to the maternity ward, she was in labor for 36 hours. My starts and stops exhausted her. My mother was 40 years old. By the time…
As a child I was never fond of classical music or opera, though my father used to blare opera music throughout our home. He would sit on the floor with my sister beside him, singing and explaining what the arias were all about. I had no patience for it. In my early 20s a cousin took me to see Turandot,…
With all the warnings about hot flashes, wrinkles, decreased libido, age spots, and so on and so on, nobody ever tells you about the possible fringe benefits of menopause. I don’t recall reading anywhere about the sudden transformation that I experienced when my ovaries halted production. I’d been painfully shy my whole life—I always had a few close friends, but…
The goal seemed completely ridiculous. Though an avid and dedicated Girl Scout in my youth, able to light fires and pilot my own canoe, I had been queried in my twenties concerning an upcoming camping trip, “What are you going to wear, a cocktail dress?” I was not an athlete, to put it mildly—more comfortable at poetry readings and pubs…
