I am a reader. According to my grandmother, when I was young I would set my alarm clock for 30 minutes earlier than I needed to get up for school, just so I could read. I don’t remember that, and as I am also a sleeper I can hardly believe it (though I do).
I do remember that I would stand on my bed at night and rest my book on the windowsill, where I could read by the light of the moon.
Recently, through Facebook, I heard from a person I …

I sometimes do what people call “spring cleaning” at the end of a year, when I get a hankering to straighten up the place — to get rid of some of the clutter that inevitably creeps into our house over the months, clean, and make room for a fresh, clean new year and its possibilities.
It was in the middle of my current purging of no-longer-needed papers from file cabinets and taking no-longer-worn clothes to Goodwill that I stumbled across a project by the photographer Michael Wolf.
Wolf is a German photographer who …

Every flight attendant’s worst nightmare, this true tale from the New York Times made me laugh. I will never look at an overhead bin the same way.

Did you hear me talking about my family’s unusual Thanksgiving tradition on NPR’s All Things Considered on Thanksgiving?

This year it was a Santa Claus pinata.
You can read about it here.

How refreshing.
I was driving in Kea‘au, stopped at a light, when three middle school-age kids in their dark green school t-shirts, two boys and a girl, walked across the street in front of me.
They’d obviously just come out of McDonald’s because they held McDonald’s bags and cups. As they got to the other side of the street, laughing and talking, they tossed their trash to the ground.
Oh, the thoughts that raced through my head: “What is the matter with them?” “WHO RAISED THEM?” “Why doesn’t one of those kids call the …