Category: My Family Matters (To Me)

  • Eating dirt

    Eating dirt

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, June 7, 2024 There was a story circulating in our family that my paternal grandmother, who died of complications of diabetes, used to eat dirt as some sort of health remedy. After my father died years later, my 60-something mother told me and my husband after dinner that she herself had…

  • Sunday’s (step)child

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, June 5, 2020   We all have our relationships with the seventh day of the week. And like so many things, how we did it as children probably forged how we do it (or don’t do it) today. Maybe you grew up staying in your polka-dot pajamas until noon on Sunday,…

  • Purple stain

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, August 2, 2019   Anybody from the northwest who likes a little sour in their fruits or is a sucker for anything that ends in “berry,” (thimbleberry, salmonberry, huckleberry, Marionberry and cloudberry, among others on a long list) will vouch for the blackberry’s true standing in the ranks. For one thing,…

  • Picking the cake

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, March 1, 2019   Growing up, we didn’t have birthday parties. Not the kind with party hats and streamers and balloons — where you and all your little banshee friends tore up the house while the adults looked on indulgently. I don’t remember going to birthday parties at all, in fact, or…

  • Dad vs curation nation

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, December 7, 2018   They come roaring in, these lists upon lists of gifts upon gifts, 10 best or dozen most useful or most quirky or most coveted. Gifts for the cook, the couple, the bookworm, the humbug, the athlete, the gentleman, the millennial, the techie, the bacon lover, the beef lover,…

  • Day of the Dead — and of the Living

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, November 2, 2018   In Santa Fe just last weekend for a visit with friends, my husband and I are lucky enough to have it all: sweet October warmth, blue sky, the coziness of all that adobe and the golden cascade of leaves coming down like coins as we stroll along. Not…