I first published this story six years ago for the prompt "Too Young to be This Old." Read More

Mainly I remember my mother’s closet as a great place to play hide and seek. It was a big walk-in closet shaped like an L, so you could go around the corner to hide and a seeker might just look in the doorway and not see you. There was also a little door that led… Read More

When I was little — practically from birth — I had a best friend named Bette. Her parents were good friends with my parents, and she had two older sisters whose ages roughly corresponded to the ages of my older sisters. Our two families rented houses next door to each other at Lake Hopatcong every summer.… Read More

It was the end of the summer of 1992. Ed and I had bought a beautiful big old house and moved into it with my two children, seven-year-old Sabrina and four-year-old Ben. It seemed like the right time to get a kitten. We knew if we took the kids with us to the animal shelter,… Read More

I must confess that I have never been very interested in science. Conversations on scientific topics tend to make my eyes glaze over. My only good science experience was in first grade. We had a lovely teacher named Miss Garcelon, who had just graduated from teachers college, and we were her first class. She decided, for… Read More

Faith, for me, is a complicated topic. As I said in an earlier Retrospect story, I mostly don’t believe in God. But for some reason I’m not quite ready to rule out the possibility entirely. For instance, all through my years in school, when I was nervous about an exam, I would talk to God, saying “if… Read More

My house is across the street from a park with several baseball diamonds, and around the corner from a school whose baseball field and snack shack are the headquarters for the local Little League. Every year on opening day there is a parade that goes past my house, with pickup trucks full of screaming little… Read More

Summer 1967 It’s the Summer of Love in San Francisco Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Meanwhile, across the country, A high school girl, not quite sixteen, End-of-summer birthday, Tall and thin, with curly hair she irons straight, And glasses which she seldom wears Feels too old to go to camp, Off to a summer… Read More

When I was growing up, my family had a ton of board games, and a finished room in the basement where we kept them all and played them with our friends or with each other. Chiefly I remember Sorry and Chutes & Ladders when I was really young, and then Monopoly and Clue when I was… Read More

Posting this on International Women's Day! * * * * * * * I was a feminist long before I knew such a word existed. Read More