All You Need is Love

A Beatles song tells us “love is all you need.” Sometimes I’m not so certain about this bold statement: I crave my work, among other things. But still, isn’t love the greatest necessity of all? As I think back over the course of my life, I see it in all its guises as it enters…

Read More

A Christmas Mac Attack

It was the day after Christmas, and in the kitchen I was savoring my supper of left-over beef tenderloin, absorbed in a book. A bit at a time, a noise intruded on my peace and quiet: paper being shredded. I knew what it meant straight off. Mac, my Dalmatian, has recently become obsessed with eating…

Read More

Tails Are Wagging in the Daffodils

Spring arrived yesterday with the vernal equinox. Two daffodils and a yellow and a purple crocus have popped up in the small, curved garden alongside my driveway. Every year, I have the same surge of hope for the new season, with all its blooms and possibilities. But today, it is rainy and raw, and those…

Read More

A Joyful Bark

This morning, Breeze got up from her padded armchair–which we have allowed to become her dog bed–and walked across our room to greet me. I was slipping out of bed, ready to take her downstairs to potty and eat breakfast, when I noticed she was holding one paw up off the ground in an exaggerated…

Read More

Autumn’s Light

Autumn came bright and early that year. My toddler and I wandered down the sidewalk over a carpet of leaves, one that created a riot of color crackling under our feet. I held his hand as he balanced himself, precariously, on a low stone wall. Periodically pain streaked, low and mean, through my belly. For…

Read More

A Chink In The Armor

Hope seemed out of the question. As we returned home from Long Island, where we had celebrated my grandson’s first birthday, we were mired in non-stop traffic when my cell phone rang. The call was from the dog sitter. While vying for a tennis ball thrown up high, Mac and Cody had collided mid-air, and…

Read More

Black Cats And Sidewalk Cracks

I am standing at my kitchen counter, filling Cody’s daily medication boxes. As I do it, I hold my breath. Despite my knowledge of common sense, I cannot deny the irrational belief that if I pour the exact number of pills out into my palm on the first pass, he will have a seizure-free week.…

Read More

Give The Boy A Dog This Summer

When I was a child, my parents held out to me the example of an excellent and dedicated writer, my great-grandfather, Arthur Gray Staples. My mother, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet herself, told me many stories of his life in Maine, in the early 1900’s, as the editor-in-chief of the Lewiston Evening Journal, which was considered…

Read More

Riding Over The Potholes

Last week in our backyard, Mac inhaled a foxtail and we spent a rocky day at the vet. For those of you who don’t know what a foxtail looks like, it is the very spiky tip of a weed–one that will work its way upward inside its host if sniffed or stepped on or should…

Read More