What if I had skinny genes—not blue jeans but the kind of genes you’re born with? What would it be like to be naturally thin? What if I were slender and willowy, the way tall women like me are supposed to be? What if I were like my mom, who always had low blood pressure and lost weight when she was stressed? What if I had a fast metabolism so I couldn’t bear to sit still and could eat anything I wanted and never gain an ounce? Continue reading
Ambush
My eyesight is failing fast. For years I have had both macular degeneration and glaucoma, but my eye doctor and I have kept them at bay with twice-daily drops and special vitamins. Now I’m having more trouble reading and watching TV. Two of my near ancestors were blind in old age. So I’m thinking about what my life will be like if my sight goes before I do. Writing is what I would miss the most; it’s how I think, maintain my equilibrium, make sense of life or concede that I can’t. I’m so used to finding words for my thoughts and reading them back that I don’t know how I could remember them otherwise. And that’s not even talking about the lists I jot down every day and depend on to organize my life. Continue reading
Mom’s Diaries
A lot of my writing work lately has centered around my mother.
I recently finished transcribing her diaries onto my computer, a task that seemed more urgent as time sped by and my own age advanced. For more than fifty years she kept a day-by-day record of her life and our family’s life, usually in little five-year line-a-day diaries but sometimes in a one-year version and one or twice in a book that was also a calendar. I have all of the diaries in a small suitcase, and I know my daughters will take care of them after I’m gone, but I also wanted that record to be available to anyone in the family who cared to have it. Even if they never read the whole thing, with their computers they can search for a date or a name or a significant word and find a bit of forgotten history, or a memory of their own. Continue reading
The House on Humboldt Street
There is a snapshot of my mom, my brother and me standing in front of the first house I remember. I was two when we moved there, five when we left, and Jim was a year and a half younger. The place had an acre of ground with a little orchard of cherry trees, a chicken house and chicken yard, and right behind the house a huge silver-leaf maple tree, where my dad hung a rope-and-board swing for us. Between the tree and the house was a high cement deck that served as a back porch.
I have just fragments of memories from there.
Wrinkles
I’d like to see a magazine published exclusively for women from 65 on up to as old as women live to be. It would be called Wrinkles and maybe subtitled “The Old Ladies’ Home Journal.”
Wrinkles would be edited and staffed by women over 65. It wouldn’t accept material by writers under that age and it would welcome articles by authors in their 70s, 80s and beyond. Continue reading