We’re in the multi-purpose room at Camp Seagull in Atlantic Beach, the smell of beans and franks still lingering in the air even after the chaffing dishes have been cleared and the tables have been pushed along the wall to make room for the thirty or so of us tenth gra...

Our nest was empty. Briefly. The college girl was on the last leg of her Senior year and the college boy had moved into his freshman dorm just six months ago. My husband and I were getting used to our new normal. Dinners with Alex Trebek. Lazy Saturday mornings with th...

I was awakened from a deep sleep by an alarm. I fumbled in the drawer of my bedside table, my foggy mind trying to recall what I needed to be preparing for this morning, but I couldn’t find the phone. I leaned over to my husband’s side of the bed but his alarm wasn’t o...

My understanding of the birds and the bees existed under a thick blanket of secrecy in the house of my childhood. When I was ten or so, I asked my mother “What is sex?” She responded, “All you need to know is to check the box that says female.” Her pursed lips put a ha...

My house is a mere shell of it’s happiest self now that the Christmas decorations are gone.  Early in December each box I bring out of the garage seems to contain multitudes of magic and memories, and each January it is increasingly difficult to get those same multitud...

The mantle in my living room is covered in garland and features my collection of twenty eight Santas, started the year I met my husband, long before I even had a mantle to put them on. The golfing Santa I gave him on our first Christmas together, the mariachi Santa pur...

One of the great gifts of my adulthood is that my dad and I are developing a friendship and coming to a place where we can laugh together. You see my dad was never someone I actually communicated with. He was always the DAD in “Love mom and dad” in her handwriting in b...

Aunt Joanne gave us the silver fish. She came down from Manhattan with a suitcase full of stylish dresses, and expensive sweaters from Lord and Taylor for my brother and me, along with a school of silver fish that must have climbed aboard the brown leather vessel from...

“Nothing interesting ever happens in Burbank,” my daughter laments. 

“Come on!” I counter, “Opie Taylor and Edward Scizzorhands were born here!”

“I mean we’re never in the news unless there’s a mountain lion spotted in Griffith Park or when Huell Howser visited Tally Ran...

I impress myself with my calmness, my consistent cheer. I wear my heart on my sleeve.  I am Type A all the way, but on the day that I move my youngest child into college, I don’t shed a single tear. Not that I’d not cried on that campus before.

After proofing countless...