My brother recently sent me a comic about aging. The first panel shows a very young man, arm in a sling, telling his neighbor that his injury was caused by falling off a house and then getting hit by a car. Panel two is the man, now middle-aged, with the same injury, but this time he is explaining he broke…

As I age, I feel my brain slowing down. I don’t always have my snappy comebacks anymore. I know exactly what I want to say, but the word won’t be delivered to my brain. Especially those nouns! Oh, the nouns. And don’t get me started on proper nouns! Toward the end of my teaching career, my students started supplying me with the word they thought was going to be next in my sentence. Sometimes they were right…

I should have known my boys were nature smart long before I had a name for it. When they were little, our house looked a lot like the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Their pockets were never empty. Rocks. Sticks. Acorns. Milkweed pods. Feathers. Pinecones. Eggshells. Seeds…

A couple of weeks ago, I was out to dinner with friends when I noticed something fascinating. Every time a server emerged from the kitchen carrying plates of food, heads turned throughout the restaurant. Not all the heads. Just the hungry ones. People would glance up hopefully, trying not to look too eager…

For my 60th birthday, my children did something I didn’t know I needed and now can’t stop talking about, partly because it was thoughtful, and partly because I spent an entire morning wearing a tiara in public like a woman who had either just been crowned or recently escaped supervision…

We’ve gone from being individuals with personalities and interests, to neatly labeled groups with shared characteristics and assigned flaws. Boomers are this. Millennials are that. Gen Z is… well, I’m still trying to figure that one out. But what I find more interesting than the labels themselves is how firmly people define themselves by what they will never become.

There’s a familiar conversation that happens whenever I go out to eat with certain people in my life. It begins the way most dinner plans do. “What do you feel like having tonight?” “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” “Really, anything is fine.” “You pick.” “Whatever’s easiest.” This is meant to be helpful…

The word oxymoron comes from two Greek roots: oxys, meaning sharp or keen, and mōros, meaning dull or foolish. Put together, the word itself is a contradiction – sharp-dull – making oxymoron an oxymoron. It first appeared in English in the 1650s, which means for centuries…

Life is shaped like a horseshoe. Or maybe a parabola, depending on how you did in high school math. Either way, there’s a point in life when we start looping back to something that looks suspiciously like our college years: living in a small, safe space where someone…

When I was younger, I thought adulthood was a finite destination. A glamorous point on the map where I’d have a fully stocked, organized spice rack, a working knowledge of how to prevent breakouts, and the ability to make small talk at parties without sweating through my shirt…