My husband grills old-school. He swears by his little Smokey Joe and refuses to upgrade to anything larger, and especially wouldn’t entertain the idea of a gas grill. When he grills, it’s an event; that grill is filled up with meat, and the smell is sublime. He’ll walk back and forth between the kitchen and the backyard, grabbing tongs and hot pads and platters with a sly grin on his face; I watch him, trying to gauge whether the side dishes I’m preparing will be ready at the same time the smoky meat is deemed edible by the grill-master.

Because Leyden kids dressed differently than we did at EP, I endured taunts and jeers as I walked through the halls on that very first day.

You’ve got to believe me.

You’ve maybe noticed how I trip over my words. Or I say things that seem to meander on a disjointed path, bereft of any point or story.

When we were told not to leave our house in order to stop the coronavirus from spreading, I wanted to leave my house in the worst possible way.

Now that restrictions are easing up and we’re slowly leaving our house again, going back to work, standing a little closer to others—close enough to have an actual conversation—well, I’m not sure I’m ready.

Of course, when he said it eight or nine months ago, the words rang hollow, as all lies do. If you spend eight months rounding a corner, that’s known as going in a circle.

But now, with vaccines abundant and with sensible citizens rolling up their sleeves to get poked, and with infection and death rates falling, it seems we’re actually rounding the corner and seeing the light at the end of a tunnel.

That’s the beauty of traveling miles away to a foreign country. You can always come back home if you don’t like it.

I get a text like this most days from my son. Reese is 16, and he was right in the middle of taking his drivers ed course when school closed because of the pandemic. Now, in what is turning out to be the slowest year of our lives, he has ample time to practice his driving. 

The funny thing is, Reese likes to text me, even if he’s just sitting across the room: “Wanna go driving?” This has become our secret signal, the unspoken get-out-of-jail-free card we have during these lazy days when COVID-19 makes it difficult to go anywhere.

But more than a half-million Americans have died of the Covid-19 virus in the past year, including a nice lady I knew.

Without warning, the reviewer compared the new novel to a previous work by the same author—the very book that I had on my nightstand!

Take a gander at my cluttered bookshelves sometime and you’ll wonder what possible value some of the items there could have to any sane, sensible man. The answer is “none,” but then we’re not talking about sane and sensible in this case, I guess.

Most of the items cluttered in front of the books are rocks.

But I’m raring to go. It’s officially spring. We have a vaccine. (Several vaccines, which is nothing short of miraculous.) Stores and restaurants are opening up, loosening restrictions. The latest question folks ask each other is, “Did you get the vaccine yet?”

This week, my kids headed back to in-person school. It felt like a momentous occasion, a celebrated return to normalcy from the “before times.” Even though I’ve loved having the kids home during remote learning, it’s been an entire year of barely going anywhere.

“Yeah,” he said, “I hated seeing all those left-wingers posing as Trump fans smash up that building.”

“Wait…what?” I said, struggling to believe that my new friend could say something like that in anything but an ironic, joking tone.

—Barbra Streisand

I knew this day was coming for a while. Yesterday, I had to say goodbye to my favorite comfy pants.

The day I met my Jammie Pants was back in my old life, before we downsized to our Cozy Cottage. We were living in the Big House, strapped with a crushing mortgage payment, limited by one income, and managing a gaggle of adorable children at home who had wants and needs that eclipsed my own.

“The beach!” they crowed in unison. Understandable, since Chicago beaches aren’t quite so tempting in December.

“OK,” I said, “but tomorrow is Saturday, so it’ll be crowded. If we don’t leave by 9 a.m. we won’t find a parking spot.

Admit it, one of your best childhood memories is waking up on a cold winter morning to find that the world outside the window has been blanketed by snow, and sitting in the kitchen listening to the radio atop the fridge as the man reads off a list of school closings. And then, when you hear your school’s name, the squeals of joy up and down the block as you and all your friends urge Mom to hurry up with breakfast so you can tumble out the door to play the day away.

In fact, I’m pretty sure if he was able to talk, he’d tell us the last year has been the best year ever.

Baxter is a 7 year-old German Shepherd/Yellow Lab mix. When we adopted him, his golden fur was baby soft and he had one ear that stood straight up and another ear that stuck out to the side, making him look like he was questioning everything around him.

I have racks and racks of baseball caps honoring the Cubs and the Bears and just about every exotic place I’ve ever visited, but I never wrote a song about any of them.

I have piles and piles of wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off my neck when I’m on the beach or in the garden, but I never wrote a song about any of them.

“Dad,” he finally said, “why does the moon follow us?”

“Follow us?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Everywhere we go,” he said, “the moon has been following us. It doesn’t matter how fast we go, we can’t get ahead of it. It’s always there.

Nearly every weekend my husband and I go camping, sometimes bringing along our children, sometimes not. In summer, we had to make reservations to be sure we got a spot. When we’d arrive on a Friday night, we’d often pull into one of the last campsites.