How did this happen? How did 75 years go by so quickly?  Wasn’t I just a Brownie? Sweet 16? Spending my college years protesting? Able to vote?  Having babies? Dreading 50?  Whoosh…

The hummingbird arrived seemingly within minutes of my hanging the first plant on the front porch.

“The purpose of Torah,” he says, “Is to encourage us and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”

This did not mean anything to me until Farah explained that Anna Jarvis was the woman who helped create Mother’s Day.

My friends Linda and Giora sent me this picture of a rainbow the other day. I was busy on a Zoom meeting and had totally missed it.

The first act of Terrance Blanchard’s opera, Champion, ends with the aria “What is a man?” sung by the boxer Emile Griffith, a closeted gay man.

I expected it would offer me the perfect incentive in the form of some new book recommendations.

What I still can’t understand is the depravity of human beings, the “acts of hideous brutality” they have shown themselves capable of throughout the ages. And I fear that this is not history, but our current reality

Posthumous edits to works by famous authors like Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl have made the news recently.

It seems that the majority of novels I have been reading lately have been visions of a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world.

I am going home next week. This is the time for making lists and feeling like I am in two places at once, and therefore nowhere. It’s stressful and bittersweet.

Last week I wrote that I wasn’t sure if I had put off writing because I was ill or because I had to write a difficult scene. I now know it was a little of both.

By Sunday morning I had tested positive for COVID. So I spent five days in my room, getting meals delivered to the door.

Anna Quindlen’s latest book, Write for Your Life, is a paean to the lost art of personal writing. After the “democratization” of writing, says Quindlen, “Writing was a kind of handshake or embrace: Hello, I see you, I want to know and understand you. I want to understand myself.”

Many years ago, I was talking to a student from Bosnia who had fled the war at home.

We can choose the world

we live in.

This year, the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires is participating in the national campaign, Shine a Light on Antisemitism, Dispel the Darkness. Its goal is to “champion the message that one small light can dispel darkness and hatred.”