No MaTTER WHAT LIFE bRINGS, i KNOW WHO i CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON. “I don’t have breast cancer,” I sobbed in relief as I hung up with my doctor. Ten bewildered faces turned to look at me. My best friends hadn’t even known cancer was a possibility. Our college gang gets together every other year, and during a recent girls’ weekend I’d vowed to wait it ...
Lung cancer. That will stop a conversation. More than any of the frightening medical diagnoses, that one seems extra ominous. Someone utters the words “lung cancer” and I think of devastating, almost insurmountable odds. At the age of 32, that’s what Lee Rhodes was told when she learned that her worrisome ...
Things come in bunches. And so this spring was a season of loss when first a friend passed away, then my mother-in-law, and finally another extraordinary woman, whom I actually only met three times in person, but who impacted the world in important and aspirational ways. The remarkable Helen Persson was 95 years old when she died. And although I ...
There’s a butterfly scar on my left knee that I refer to as my war injury. It’s the legacy of a spectacular crash into a metal telephone pole support, while riding what my sisters and I fondly called “The War Bike.” The War Bike had been my mother’s childhood transportation in the years following World ...
The first time I met acclaimed artisan Barney Bellinger, he was walking in my sister’s house with a school kid’s grin and a big basket of mushrooms. “I just found these oysters on the tree behind your shed,” he asked causally. “There are tons of them. How about if I cook them up for the dinner?” ...