I love the clerks in my local grocery store. The same women scan and weigh and slide my yogurt and tortilla chips every week. At first they appear pretty gruff and I confess to wondering if they love or hate me and my type, us food-eating, grocery store shopping types. I am fairly certain we …

I played softball as a young girl. Slow pitch, girls softball on a local community league. My poor parents, left out in the sun to watch kids swing and miss. I recall running bases and working on my pitches at the wise old age of 10. Our team was quite lousy. Actually, for two years …

So today is Earth Day which means a bunch of greenies like me are running around telling everyone to perk up and plant something. It also starts millions of other people groaning under the irritating weight of the environmental conversation. For good reasons on both sides people either love or hate the eco-chatter this day …

It is still very much winter in Chicago. Sure, the calendar says March 1, but the piles of snow on the ground look more like mid-January. Everything is brown and crusty. A little bit of warmth is creeping back into the days, it is no longer pitch black before dinner. But there is also snow …

Last week I was at the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon. I was sans children and when that happens a trip to the grocery store can feel like spring break. No one nagging me or ripping cans off the shelves. A glorious hour indeed. As I waltzed down the aisles and took my time …

I visited one of the most fabulous friends today for an afternoon of playing with our children, six between the two of us. It was a visit complete with dangling costume jewelry and Darth Vader capes. An excellent afternoon of adventure if you ask me. My friend lives about 30 minutes from our house so …

I have had two images thrashing about in my mind this past week. As a woman, daughter, and a mother, one of these images will likely stalk my memory forever. It is the picture of a young child in Haiti cuddling up to the dead body of her mother. Her mother’s body is one of …

I’m blogging from Colorado today. With John Denver’s sunshine literally on my shoulder and a few cloudless days of skiing behind me. I would take a moment to lament the fact that my legs ache, my back hurts, and my lips are chapped, but those of you who ski will not have sympathy for me. …

As a child, whenever a teacher or parent would tell a group of us kids to “stop standing around and do something,” I would bristle. An outsider, who had no clue that our little conversation, game, or plot to take over the play ground was of supreme importance in our world, would irk me. Someone …

For those of you who are urbanites like I am, which I know is most of you since statistics say something like 80% of the nation lives on roughly 20% of the land in the US, spending time in the downtown area of your closest big city is often something we take for granted. I …