Buy books. Obviously. Because if you must be quarantined in your house for weeks at a time then heaven forbid you run out of reading material. No, the five-million unread books you already own are not enough. Silly you. You must organize the perfect reading list for the occasion and of course, this will require a few book purchases. Never say that every cloud does not have a silver lining. Buy tea because the only thing almost as bad as running out of books is running out of tea. You must have endless cups to handle each new piece of information about the doom all around you. Buy chocolate. No…

Today is the last day of the year and all I have to say is good riddance. It has been a pretty awful year and because it has been awful I have struggled to read and to write blog posts. Well, I have struggled to read books that I want to write blog posts about. I have read plenty but I have read a lot of junk and reread a lot of old favorites. I have many books on my shelves that I am sure I will love and that I am sure I will want to write about but it just sounds like so much effort. I want to…

Few things taste as good as an apple you have plucked from the tree yourself. It is best eaten while wandering through the orchard with friends. Life is even better if the friends have a three-year-old who is thrilled with everything. Even the teenagers got over-excited and ran around madly filling bags to overflowing with all different varieties of apples. I see apple pie, apple crisp, apple bread, and applesauce in our futures. There is something so satisfying about something as simple as apple picking. I don’t know why. It isn’t as if we grew the apples but you watch your bag fill up, you chat with friends, you wander…

Quiet mornings with my book and a cup of tea. A walk by the lake with my husband. Sitting on the deck with only the sound of the breeze through the trees. Chat, just chat, with all stressful subjects banned for the week. A drive up the road looking for moose; we haven’t seen any yet but I live in hope. Cell phones that don’t work here. A game of cribbage or two. Conversations that don’t have to be edited for the ears of teenagers who hear everything except what you want them to hear. Puttering around with my camera. The slow letting go of the constant anxiety that has…

Monday was the first day of summer. I know this because my daughter’s alarm did not go off at 5:30 a.m. School ended the week before and now we have ten glorious weeks without homework, rigid schedules, and last minute panic about gym clothes that should have been washed but weren’t. Summer doesn’t start based on a calendar or the weather. Summer starts when school ends. I’m relishing the summer because I know the days are numbered where I will have a kid with the summer off; a kid who wants plans and trips to the beach and who is happy to have me involved in these plans. Thankfully, my…