• LIFE IS A CRAPSHOOT

    As we sat finishing our lunch at a roadside restaurant on our way to the Rainforest in Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, my tablemate said, “It’s all a crapshoot.” We had been talking about the aging process. She uttered the same term I had been using ever since my husband and I bought a two-story town house…

  • Celebrating Forty Years of Friendship

    Originally posted on Write Along with Me: Proverbs 18:26 Friends come and friends go, but a true friend sticks by you like family. Readers of Caring Lessons know I was desperate to find a friend when I was in my early thirties, someone like me, a nurse and mom who wanted to go back to…

  • SO WHAT’S NOSTALGIZING?

    Nostalgizing is a new word for me. I discovered it in a New York Times article: Tierney, John. What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows. The New York Times, 8 July, 2013. I needed to re-read the essay for reassurance that feelings of nostalgia I’ve been experiencing with some frequency could very…

  • THE FALL

    I entered a large department store on a rainy Sunday two weeks ago. My foot hit a slick spot and I became airborne. You know that awful feeling when you’re going down and there is nothing you can do about it. I drifted in slow motion closer and closer to a display table, finally making…

  • PERSISTENCE

    In 2014, I finished my memoir. In spite of myself, I persisted and finished. Ten years ago, I left a full time nurse practitioner job and began to write in earnest. The book I just birthed is not the one I started then. It has been configured many times: moving chapters, changing tenses from past…

  • TAKING THE BUS

    My husband and I will move into in our new Raleigh town house at the end of the week. Part of the reason for our move, besides being nearer to the grandchildren, is that we want more of a city life. Our last house, in a lovely forested neighborhood, was tranquil and isolated. We needed…