Nostalgia

When I moved from Tokyo to New York, I was a young mom with three children under 3 years old. I was too busy settling down in a new home, in a new country, in a new continent to notice much about the weather. I didn’t know then how much it would…

When women begin looking back over their lives for wisdom, there is often a season they would rather skip. The diagnosis. The divorce. The loss that rearranged everything. The years they simply survived. “Surely,” we think, “there’s nothing worth sharing in that.” I’ve come to believe the opposite. Some of our hardest chapters hold our deepest wisdom…

The best homes have a subtle way of taking care of you. Their thoughtful features can lighten the endless work of keeping house while making life more comfortable and enjoyable. Why do some older houses feel more welcoming and full of character than many built today? I was discussing this with a friend when…

I just finished the book Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid for my book club. Although it is fiction, I found it insightful in many ways. What struck home for me was the “burden” the women astronauts felt in being the first women in the space program. Not only were they expected to be exceptional in their respective field of expertise…

Evites, Facebook birthday wishes, thank you texts, catch up emails… many of our generation lament the loss of paper invitations, formal thank you notes, birthday cards and an occasional newsy letter. I have boxes of thin, blue, “by air only” letters that my Belgian parents sent each other in the 1950s and those my mother, after moving to the US, exchanged with her parents…

When the summer of 1969 rolled around, I had just turned 15. I vividly remember the day my mother came into my room and handed me a round ticket to Lausanne, Switzerland, to spend a summer at their International Teen Camp.

“There will be teens from all over the world,” she told me, “It will be good for you to get out of the city.”

For most of my life, I looked at family photos as most others did – they were little snippets of time. I would pick up a few envelopes of prints and flip through the 20 or 36 photos inside, still safely ensconced in their designated sleeve right next to their…

My mother, Estelle, was born Esther Lanch in 1911 and raised in a Jewish household in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. From Odesa, where her mother was raised, to London and the Jewish communities of Montreal, New York, and San Francisco, the family encountered anti-Semitism in mid-Twentieth-Century America…

There is a particular kind of grief that doesn’t have a funeral. No one sends flowers when your favorite restaurant closes after 50 years. There is no ceremony when the beach bar where you spent a hundred perfect afternoons nails a sign on the door and goes quiet forever. My wife and I created so many memories…

The other morning, I found myself listening to a song I hadn’t heard in quite a while. It was “Monsters” by James Blunt. The first time I heard that song years ago, it hit me like a freight train. Something about the sadness in the lyrics, the emotion in his voice…