A Quilt is More than Fragments By age 92 my mother was no longer independent, though she lived in the house my parents had bought sixty years before. My brother and I were far away, and Mom depended on the kindness of neighbors and a bit of hired help to shop for her, do her laundry, and vacuum her rugs. Mom’s car rusted, undriven for years, in the driveway. The neighbors were burning out; one
Small-Press Publishing in 2024 Flashback to 1988 in San Francisco when I was the publisher of Foghorn Press, a start-up with no capital. We had big dreams—dreams that actually manifested in high sales. Each year, we shipped 40,000 copies of our lead title, the guidebook California Camping, the golden goose of our list. Our other guidebooks sold heartily as well (5,000 to 25,000). That was our reality. Fast forward to 2022 and the launch of
What to Expect When You Are Seventy Having been in my seventies for all of six months, I am only marginally qualified to write about this decade. But never having been reticent about sharing an opinion, whether informed or not, here is what I know so far. If you’re a Crone in Training in your forties through sixties, please consider this essay a missive from the future. First of all, the stereotype of the Frail
Embracing Sensuality in Midlife: A Journey of Liberation and Self-Expression If you would have asked me in my twenties and thirties to show up on social media and modeling campaigns in my bra and knickers, I would have run a mile! I wasn’t comfortable looking at myself in the mirror, never mind letting a total stranger see me. So how did I end up becoming a lingerie model in my forties? As for so many
Three Crones to Watch Out For The subject of “super-agers” came up in a recent Old School Office Hours (which, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a weekly Zoom gathering of folks interested in anti-ageism, convened by the esteemed Ashton Applewhite). You know who we mean by “super-ager:” The eighty-year-old who climbs a mountain. The ninety-year-old who runs their first marathon. Nothing against these olders; it’s great that they are living their best
The Vista of Years In this decade of my life, I find writing about my childhood in the 1960s to be comforting. I don’t write exclusively about that era; many of my personal essays chronicle more recent years with my husband and daughter and our rural life in Western North Carolina. But I often find myself recollecting my early years in my hometown, Marion, North Carolina, where I was born and still live. My childhood
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