I first posted this essay for CafeMom.com, but liked it so much I wanted to share! This Christmas stood out for a lot of non-traditional reasons.  I was behind on everything due to multiple family disasters a hundred miles away that started...

Christmas got improvisational this year.  There's a long list of things that didn't get done, didn't get taken out of boxes, didn't get bought, didn't get baked.  I used "imaginary" wrapping paper on the presents because I didn't have time to...

My big backyard has seen a lot of traffic over the years--redtailed hawks, wild turkeys, deer, foxes, coyotes, rabbits, to name a few visitors--but I haven't seen a possum out there in at least fifteen years!  This guy--or gal, I didn't get close...

We're expecting another foot of snow starting tomorrow night.  Winter unofficially started here in southern Wisconsin on December 1.  When I sent the chocolate lab out the door to take care of business after that first blizzard started to...

There comes a time when the torch gets passed, and the new generation cooks the Thanksgiving turkey.  Mine was yesterday, when we all traveled a hundred miles to my oldest daughter's apartment where she and her new husband hosted their first married...

Sometimes "growing bolder" means you have to stretch yourself in ways you hadn't thought imaginable just the day before.  I got the phone call we all dread, a late-afternoon alert that my 85 year old wheel-chair bound mother had fallen and...

Every so often I'm gripped by the urge to rent a "classic" movie to see what the fuss was all about.  In the past couple of years, this has led me to "Requiem for a Heavyweight" (splendid), "Rebel without a Cause" (a tad overdone) and "Cat on a...

It’s getting to be that time of year again, when squirrels store more nuts and the evenings get longer and in certain parts of the country (like mine, for instance), you start waking up to a crystalline blanket of frost on the lawn.  Squadrons...

Just got back from Washington D.C. yesterday where I got to see my daughter, Sarah Muehlbauer, standing next to her dress and video which are on display in the S. Dillon Ripley Gallery of the SMITHSONIAN!!!!!  Pardon the exclamation points, I'm...

There was no end in sight to the household details to get to after my daughter's recent wedding, but as I stepped up to the kitchen sink, through the window I could see dozens of like-sized birds silhouetted against the light grey sky in a dead tree...