It was out there, in my driveway, a big box on wheels.

"Don't you want to see it?" my husband asked.

"No."

"It's blue."

"I see that."

It was very blue, our new minivan. I turned away from the window, wondering if this was it -- the final death blow to my… Read full post »

"In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that the person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must… Read full post »

I've never liked my birthday, and not just for the usual reasons. My parents divorced before I turned two and, from earliest memory, birthdays were lined up alongside other holidays and divided: odd years with dad, even years with mom. That special day -- just one day distinguishable from the ot… Read full post »

I walked into the courthouse prepared to hate the woman.

“She abandoned us,” my client had told me. She was never the kind of woman you marry, he’d said. He should have known. They’d been married less than a year when she packed her clothes in a single cardboard box and drove… Read full post »

Sometimes - not too often - I find people I love.

I love my husband's paternal grandmother, although she probably doesn't know it. She's gracious and smart and keeps a big calendar with hundreds of birthdays and anniversaries scribbled in the little squares. Had she been born in another time, she… Read full post »

Yesterday, I looked up from my computer screen to see my firm's new law clerk hovering in the doorway - hovering being an essential trait in any law clerk. Young, eager, and overworked, they're an anxious breed desperate to please. I've been thinking of getting a couple for around the house.

&nb… Read full post »

One of my favorite people in the whole wide world is a middle-aged hippie named Kitty.

Ours is an unusual friendship in that she has no idea who I am, even though we've been interacting for years. Kitty probably doesn't know my name, but I know hers. Oh yes. Of course, that's… Read full post »

I know this much about my grandmother: she liked birds, she collected refrigerator magnets, and she wrote poetry in secret.

Of course that's not everything, but it's enough. One could gather these three things and imagine a lone woman hunched over a desk, hurriedly scribbling lines of verse under the/… Read full post »

Yesterday, I had an impromptu therapy session with a friend's mother.

I looked up from my desk at work and smiled to see an old friend standing in the doorway. I'd been expecting him, as we had plans to do lunch and catch up on the last several months of each other's… Read full post »