Dear Nicholas, I fell. I’m refusing to think of this as an “old person thing,” though I do know that physicians like to ask their more mature patients, “Have you fallen in the last three months?” as if that were significant information. Gardening in the Dark I was out doing some late-night watering and inexplicably […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, A man I talked with on a bus in 1970 emailed to tell me that something I said on that ride kept him alive in a life raft decades later in brutal cold 400 miles east of Gander, Newfoundland.  You can imagine how flattered and stunned I was. One of my most troubling obsessions […] Read More

  Dear Nicholas, Thanks for the sneak peek at my whole adult life. It was a rare and enlightening opportunity–turning through the notes you made in our sessions from when I was twenty-four to when I hit sixty-four. “What my psychotherapist wrote about me” is not something I ever expected to read. Reading these notes was […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, We went to visit the wee lass, my newborn step-grandbaby, in her hometown of Krakow, Poland. Now I have a very extended family and a faraway baby to visit on Skype. The arrival of Annabella has widened the reach of my roots in the world in a way I hadn’t expected. We don’t all […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I rode on a plane. Came home and got sick. I feel awful. I’ve caught a nasty airplane bug, I’m guessing. And I am freshly awed by the power of a wee microbe, making a short visit, to bring body and spirit to their knees. It doesn’t take a monster illness to briefly […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I don’t want to say I’m slowing down. I don’t like the sound of that. But I may be on the edge of something  similar–no more overscheduling is one way to think of it. Or: allowing more time for things. Busy all the time is not the way I want to be. It’s […] Read More

Nicholas, it’s spring! the year’s true fresh start! renewal, resurrection, release–and lovely mud. And I so love playing in my yard, weeding and “breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” T.S. Eliot said it better than anyone, though the land is never dead really, just waiting to burst forth again. A Leaf Garden? In my woodland […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, My step-grandbaby is a few days old, living in Krakow, Poland. My search for flights to go visit is sliding into pathological. I’m not exaggerating.  I’m trying to figure out a reasonably-priced reasonably-doable way for her granddaddy and me to go meet her. Arranging a wonderful trip should not put me into the tailspin […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I’m in a state of mind that’s new to me: angry and sad at the same time. Angry sad! I don’t like it. The triggers seem to be: mortality and the fact that I’m  now taking 25 mg less of my mental health OCD medication, which perhaps makes mortality harder to deal with. […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I found this week, as I was going through pictures and papers my mother left, a surprise document. In a “baby book”– filled in at the start but quickly going blank, of course–she had written her baby’s first words, my first words, back in the good year 1949. They are revealing. So I’m […] Read More