I remember everything, or at least the things that matter. I remember every pore of his skin, the encysted bump he had on the back of his head, the way [...]

An attractive blonde, wine glass in hand, sidled up to my husband. I could tell she was smart. She subtly moved her gaze from one end of the room to [...]

The questions of children never fail to reach to the center of things. I realized this anew sitting at my table answering the letters of a friend’s eighth-grade science class. [...]

One day I woke up and learned, at  62 years old, that my significant other,the love of my life, was having an affair with his ex-wife. I immediately threw him [...]

Seventeen years ago Wednesday, I knelt on a carpeted floor in a rented Seattle apartment, tilting a carrot cake I’d just finished baking and decorating with a big numeral “1” [...]

Late October, 2009
On a Wednesday evening in late October, my ten-year-old daughter and I rolled a suitcase across the park that is Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights, New York. It [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Of all the Christmas gifts I received when I was six years old, one thrilled and excited me the most—a small book with a red faux-leather cover inscribed with gold [...]

Except for the usual commercial ones, we had no special Christmas traditions in my family when I was a child. We didn’t even prepare our own dinner, since the head [...]