By Laura Baudo Sillerman

A tribute to Jeanne-Claude, the radiant, risk-taking, and detail-oriented partner to Christo.

The last time we heard about the latest adventures of poet and  frequent WVFC contributor Alice Pettway, she was processing an abrupt shift in her Peace Corps plans after her posting in Mauritania was canceled. But we’ve just learned, and are happy to report, that Alice’s new Peace Corps country director, in Mozambique, has agreed [...]

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” in grated carrots and a single candle toward a toddler I’ll call Eli, wobbly and uncertain on his feet, supported by his mother’s protective grasp. [...]

New Year’s resolutions are made and broken by most people soon after the list is made. It is often difficult to imagine how to make a resolution that will change either the big or small things that are impeding growth personally, in relationships, or at work. It is hard to comprehend how to do things [...]

Pulling on her size 4 1/2 combat boots to meet her driver who sped through wartime Italy’s treacherous streets, Sgt. Myrtle Vacirca had no time to reflect on how her own unlikely history of peril and promise had brought her to this point. That day in 1943, she was just another member of the OSS, [...]

I did not feel well enough to travel this holiday. Normally, I would have pushed my way through it, but my husband gave me this gift of the day, the turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie that I needed for my soul. I needed time to be and not do more than I could do, [...]

“Let’s have a family Thanksgiving,” I said to my friend Mary, “without any blood relatives.” It was a time a few years ago when I had had my fill of filial histrionics and was fed up with the my-way-or-the-highway holiday hosts. I wanted a tradition without the traditional baggage, a happy feast prepared and shared [...]

The Constitution Center in Philadelphia, perhaps best known in recent years as the site of President Obama’s iconic speech on race, was packed this past Monday night. The two women onstage, Lynn Yeakel and Gail Collins — Yeakel, a Drexel University professor and the woman who challenged Senator Arlen Specter in 1992, and Collins, the [...]

Eager to see what the Shriver Report has to say about women over 50, I paged through my electronic copy, wishing in my over-50 way that I had physical pages to flip and leaf through. But despite my failure to find any chapter or essay specifically dedicated to those of us who remember only too [...]

Every once in a while, there comes along an example of creativity that makes you wish you’d never praised one other thing, since so many of the words you might choose in exaltation have been made less by being applied elsewhere. This is such a moment. An Education is such a film. There is nothing [...]