The very next month we would be celebrating 32 years of marriage. But that morning...well, just look at the picture. I had cried my eyes out for a good long time that morning, while my amazing husband tried to console me. Two of those rings had been on my finger for our entire married life, except for when I would occasionally take them off --as in this instance. So that night before, I had been buttering potatoes for baking and had figured they'd be safe in the cup of m

Summer is so lovely, isn’t it? The sun, the flowers growing, the pollinators buzzing, the delicious laziness of it all when you sit outside just so the sun can warm up your bones….ah wonderful, right? But periodically, I have that same delicious laziness rudely interrupted, either from my own thoughts, or by my husband’s casual reminders that Fall. Is. Coming. Even as I write this, I groan a little! I groan a little because with Fall, comes all the “have to deal with” pro

Ya know the past couple months have been a bit of a crazy ride, haven’t they? Are you feeling some hopelessness? Things are swirling around and you can’t quite get a handle on it? When I was a little girl, attending our local Catholic school near my home, my mom would occasionally let us buy those little cartons of milk they offered. Or sometimes the Scholastic Book Club would send those little catalogs and I’d want to pick out a book. BUT, in order to do either of those

I have always loved words. As a child, I loved all aspects of words: the spelling bees, the diagramming trees and branches, vocabulary tests, and in my later school years –the etymology of words. That’s just a fancy way of saying “the roots of words.” For me to discover that our English words have their roots in many Greek and Latin words –well, that just opened up a whole new world to me! A world that finally made sense to my brain…it was like finally discovering a treas