Dear Readers: My newest novel, THE SUITOR, will be published next week, June 20, and available on Amazon in eBook or print format. I know that’s only six days away, but you probably can’t wait, so here’s a link to the first chapter. What’s this story about, you ask? Here’s the logline: When a recent college graduate suddenly falls in love with an ambitious schemer...
This time of year when the trees leaf out I remember the American elm in front of my house when I was a kid. Its limbs flared toward the sky like an elegant vase, the branches and leaves spreading a canopy as wide as the tree’s height. The flat, egg-shaped seeds covered our sidewalk and driveway. Then Dutch elm disease made its way to Buffalo, and the elms lining our street withered and the city...
Day after day I get preoccupied with petty concerns, and then a shift in the light has a way of nudging me to get out of my head and look up from my desk because there’s something I should see right outside my window, it will last for but a few moments in a world that keeps turning, so take a break and experience the wonder, then go back to your little problems if you must.
April 20 (4/20) is weed day. The day got its name in the 1970s in California when a group of high school students met after school around 4:20 to get high and 4/20 became a code phrase they could use in front of their parents. Clever stoner types, these high school kids. The reputation of 4/20 spread from there. 420 Magazine, founded in 1993, has a mission around creating cannabis awareness. I...
Three straight days of incessant rain and I’ve decided if there is a fourth I will have to consider building an ark. But the fourth day dawns in a shroud of fog and later in the morning the sun melts the mist away and the garden pops before my eyes. The daffodils debut and the one good hyacinth bursts in purple perfume, the vinca open their periwinkle blooms on a backdrop of green, and the...
Dear Readers: For those of you who have been anxiously awaiting my next book, you will soon be rewarded! THE SUITOR will be published in May just in time for you to have a great summer read. I’m pleased to share the cover with you today. Every good story answers a key question. THE SUITOR: What does a father do when he vehemently opposes the young man his daughter is determined to marry...
First the freezing rain fell and the world turned to glass until the temperature climbed just enough and the ice became rain, just rain, torrential and unrelenting for hour upon hour under heavy iron skies until the thermometer dropped back down and the rain froze again and the snow soon followed with jaw-dropping ambition, the inches quickly piling up, nature flexing its heavy muscles, and then...
March in the Northeast mountains is known as mud season: melting snow, heavy streams, mashed potato mud, and stretches of hardened ice on the trails. Everyone says stay away. But we couldn’t. The day was too beautiful. Hunter Mountain is the second tallest peak in the Catskills, but it’s easily accessible by hiking a trail up the backside of the mountain. We were prepared for mud...
It was an inappropriate kiss. No, inappropriate implies an error in judgment, but also could mean an oblivious choice. She was definitely not oblivious. She knew exactly what she was doing. A forbidden kiss. That sounds mysterious and foreboding, promising trouble to come. But no, forbidden smacks of rules and regulations. It implies secrecy. This was a kiss out in the open that we all saw happen...
I’d never seen this photo until my sister sent it to me. Canada, summer, cottage life. Of course I looked down when someone was taking my photo. I’m guessing I’m around seven years old. My parents are in the background over my right shoulder. If I was seven, my mom was forty-one. She looks so exotic to me in this photo, like a movie star all in white with her sunglasses and...
I recently wrote in “A Beautiful, Bracing Chill” about how I dove into the chilly waters of Lake Erie even though I was hesitant to do so. But I didn’t want my ritual swim after a run to “become just one more thing I don’t do anymore because I’m old or lazy or too sensitive to the cold.” Yesterday, I realized Halloween was going by the wayside as well. Every year with the kids we used to visit a...
Who among us hasn’t needed to step outside? Take a moment to calm and gather ourselves. And this is what greets us: a world so demanding our attention and wonder, that all else pales. Behind this black cloud, our moon is brilliant and full.
Maria Popova is a thinker, philosopher, and writer who inspires me every week with her “personal record of reckoning with our search for meaning.” Her website and newsletter, The Marginalian, turned seventeen years old this week, and Maria shared with her readers seventeen of the most important things she has learned—one for each year. I’m sharing her list with you. Click here. Many of her...
Recently I’ve written a few somber posts, like “Facing (or not) the Long Goodbye.” Sometimes I have to do that, to get it out of me. Not that I want to throw it on you, but I believe for all of us there is great value in a sad story. Today is different. Today the sun is shining and the wind chimes are playing an extended set and I remember how much I love October. I got up from...
One of my joys of summer is taking a hot, sweaty run and finishing on the shores of Lake Erie where I pull off my shirt and shoes and plunge into the refreshing lake—floating, cooling off, recovering. Every time I visit the summer place in Canada I look forward to this ritual. But now it’s near the end of September, summer gone, and the morning temp is cool and the run didn’t make me so hot and...
