I saw no mystery in it.  When I was a child of 5 or 6, I made perfume by gathering sweet-smelling flowers, roses, daphne, and honeysuckle, and dropped them into a bowl of cold water.  Next, I crushed them with a wooden spoon and after a few minutes, I had perfume for my moth

I love sinking into a new book from Alexander McCall’s First Ladies’ Detective series. Set in East Arica’s Botswana, the area around which I lived for two years, I am well acquainted with the rhythms of life in that part of the sub-Saharan desert.  Each new book is like a t

Georgia O’Keefe, “…laughed at the idea that anyone would care what she ate for breakfast, yet she understood that the mythology surrounding an artist’s practice was useful material.”  (“Self-Made Woman,” by Rachel Syme, New Republic, July 2017, pg. 59.)  Ernest

I’ve always loved high fashion.  I consider it an art form, though you’d never guess to look at me. In my retirement years, I might pass for a bag lady.  If I could, I’d wear pajamas all day.  Dominique Browning, former head of House and Gardens, befor

A few days ago, I left my hairdresser’s shop feeling happy. When a woman’s hair looks good, she feels good, too. Then I reached my car and discovered my keys were missing. Suddenly I felt as if I’d swallowed a live gerbil. Of course, my keys had to be near. I’d driven to the s

When a person reaches “a certain age,” doctors begin to examine him or her with an eye to senility.   One of their tests requires a patient to draw the face of a clock and insert the required numbers.  I tend to fail because I prefer hexagonal clocks to round ones a

Events around the globe don’t seem to be pointing to a bright future. Besides polluting the environment, we seem bent on killing each other.  Perhaps that’s why the number of articles about how to stay happy seems to be multiplying faster than rabbits in old Mr. McGregor’s

“Getting knocked down is one thing—being a coward is something else.” So says, Sally Field who knows a thing or two about getting knocked down. She won her first Academy Award for her performance in the film, Norma Rae, (1979) but it was a role for which she was not the studio�

I surprised myself this morning and not pleasantly. After spending weeks trying to renew my mother’s handicapped parking placard with the Department of Motor Vehicles, I found the one I’d obtained earlier in my glove compartment. Now I had two placards with different numbers. What

Recently, someone on Facebook broke into a political discussion to suggest the debate was irrelevant. Life was predetermined and free will didn’t exist. The comment took me back to my undergraduate days as a student of philosophy. Even so, I didn’t reply. I knew kissing my elbow w