You may recall that earlier in 2009 we celebrated Lisa Russ Spaar with these words from the judges of the Library of Virginia Literary Award: “her poems ‘abound in surprising inversions of syntax, and a diction striking for its sudden shifts from demotic to baroquely laden speech — from imagistic precision to statement.’” What better [...]

I discovered the first grey in my hair on Christmas day – several grey hairs, actually. Grey is not easy to detect in blond, but there they were, unmistakably. They looked quite beautiful (if I may say so myself): My head of straw was given a quiet shine of distinction by just a dozen strategically [...]

As New Year’s resolution season approaches, many of us are thinking about food and our health. And luckily, we’ve got an early start from Donald Hensrud, M.D., M.P.H., and his co-authors at the Mayo Clinic, who have just finished a new edition of The Mayo Clinic Diet: Eat Well. Enjoy life. Lose Weight (on the [...]

I have been waiting to see Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, with all their middle-age glory, in a state of postcoital bliss for months now. I was not disappointed to see the eternal adolescent Jake, played by Alec Baldwin, seducing his former wife, Jane, played by Meryl Streep. Days before the unexpected sexual encounter, Jane [...]

The National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP have just released a new report about caregivers in the United States, an update of the last one issued in 2004. In just five years, I am amazed by some of the new information, and how significantly some of the numbers have changed. The report is based on [...]

Sara Henderson remembers exactly where she was on Christmas night five years ago, when she learned that a powerful earthquake had caused a tsunami off the coast of Indonesia, killing over 200,000 people and leaving far more without homes. “I was in New York for Christmas,” she told WVFC this week. “It was 9 p.m. [...]

There are many of us for whom the secular Christmas is fraught with landmines of memories. In our dysfunctional ways we learn to manage these memories. We avoid the holiday, we suffer through it, or we make it an MGM spectacular event. I chose the Hollywood option. I loved making Christmas special when I was [...]

My great grandmother, Nellie Wall Holsey, may well have been the world’s first re-gifter. Way back in the early 1950s, she was infamous within the family and the little community she lived in – Hardwick, Ga., an outpost of Milledgeville – for squirreling away presents and bringing them back out, rewrapped, for another occasion. Birthday [...]

Theresa Heinz Kerry’s last piece seen at WVFC was on the need for long-term care to be included in health reform, which seems now to be occurring (at least as of today). Even then, we learn  now, Heinz Kerry was facing her own health-care crisis, after a routine mammogram last year revealed she had  breast [...]

‘Tis the week of the season when we often allow the lists to dominate and permit anxiety the role of dominant feeling. More put-upon than under the spell of what we once believed to be magical, we wake with worry that we haven’t done enough and disbelief that the date is so late. Today though, [...]