Lifestyle

As I wrote in my August column, autumn is the best time to visit Sicily if you’re looking for ways to stimulate your taste buds. Not only are the temperatures mild, but harvest time arrives in full force, bringing a multitude of flavours.

If you can’t get to Sicily this autumn, the next best thing is to bring Sicily to you! This is one of my favourite autumn dishes, packed with traditional flavours…

As we grow older, we often think about maintaining strength in our legs, heart, and muscles. But there is another kind of strength that deserves attention: the strength of our speaking voice. A strong, clear voice helps us communicate, participate socially, speak up in medical appointments, enjoy conversations, and feel more confident in daily life…

At the first stage of retirement, the transition stage, it is sometimes difficult to remember what day of the week it is when you wake up. For me, my pill box is my first reminder! A friend once told me that retirement meant that every day was Saturday…

When people start thinking seriously about retiring abroad, the questions tend to come in a fairly predictable order. How much does it cost to live there? Can I get a retirement visa? What is the healthcare like? Can foreigners buy property? How much tax will I pay? They are all perfectly sensible questions. In fact, you would be unwise not to ask them…

There is a word I have been thinking about lately: margin. Years ago, when I was teaching first graders how to write, I remember pointing out the faint margin lines running down both sides of their copybooks. “See these lines?” I would say. “Your writing begins here on the left, and it stops here on the right. You don’t write all the way to the edge.”

It was dinner time, and I had barely anything in my refrigerator. I was hungry but didn’t have a clue what to make. I decided to see if AI could help. I started typing. “I need an easy recipe using cabbage, onions, and a few eggs. And I have some spices.” That was all I typed. AI gave me the most amazing baked cabbage recipe…

While sorting through my inbox, I came across one email with the subject line “Loving Life with Less.” Given my interest in downsizing, I was very excited to read it. Yes! I thought. That’s exactly the goal…

At 90, I have discovered something rather amusing about getting older: the calendar insists I am old, but most days I don’t feel particularly interested in cooperating with it. I believe one reason is simple: I nearly always have something to look forward to. It may be a book I am working on…

In the two years before I retired, I put “write myself a job description for my retirement” on a list. Retirement, for those keeping score, is the part where you don’t have a job. The list lived on my phone, in a note called Elaine’s Retirement. It had 14 sections, because apparently my retirement required the same scope as my 1994 dissertation. Spiritual, Hobbies, Creativity…

Growing into my wisdom each year, I have noticed the desire for ease and simplicity. It wasn’t always like this. I spent many years wasting my energy and time worrying about things that I couldn’t control and really didn’t matter…