One night my husband and I were having dinner with a group of friends. There were three couples, and all of our children were there playing together, so it was a pretty full house. The father of one friend was visiting, too. I had never met my friend's father, and I passed much of the evening without talking; partly because I'm an introvert and tend to get quieter the more people are around, and partly because I had just been going through a difficult season and was feeling p

Questions of Childhood I don't know if all children have as many questions as I did, but I remember thinking about things a lot. And not the useful kinds of things that other people apparently thought about and knew, like how to climb the bleachers in the gym without tripping. I fell spectacularly on those bleachers at my school, in front of everyone. Not just once. Multiple times. It generally happened because I was thinking about something else, and forgot to pay attention

I grew up on a farm. We didn’t raise crops, but we did raise a lot of animals. Horses and dogs and cats, always. Sometimes fish and pigs and chickens and baby calves. My brother was known to bring home box turtles and snakes, too. Once I even had birds—a pair of finches—but they died, leaving a nest of unhatched eggs that I kept in my room for months, just in case. That’s me, the eternal optimist. I’m not sure what I would have done if they had miraculously hatched; I’m prett

When I was asked to start this blog, I’ll be honest: I had to google “blogs”. Technology is not a strength of mine, and it seems a new century began without my being particularly aware of it. My children have been trying to convince me of this for years, but I blissfully ignored them. They grew up gathering in the living room after dinner for “family reading” around the fireplace because we had no television. When my oldest son started high school and tried to persuade me it