Columns

Editor’s note: The following guest column was submitted by Catherine Minolli, the Times’ former editor, who retired in September 2019. She currently operates Peaceful Moon Yoga. Ahhh, the poetry of Spring! The season of rebirth and renewal...the time when the Earth...

Last Wednesday began in my sunny kitchen, chopping broccoli and onions for soup with Joyce. At 10 a.m. she arrived towing two photo albums, her memoir in progress, and coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate. Her immediate eye spied the ruffled bowl holding Granny Smith...

My mom passed away on a Sunday morning. We went home after that to get ourselves together and headed for the funeral home. It was still very surreal. The fact that I witnessed her spirit leave her body when she died was pushed back into the recesses of my mind. We had...

My one and only beehive survived the winter. Ecstatic with joy and disbelief, I want to shout it from my housetop, but have a feeling those pollinators are planning to swarm. My favorite beekeepers, heroes who know honeybee behavior, say swarming is a sign of a...

Last night, the thumbnail moon and shimmering Venus stole my extra night of Leap Day’s sleep to count my blessings. I recalled the four Thursdays in February, thankful for safety to and from a memoir class. The thermostat fell the lowest, and snow piled the highest...

The very moment my mother took her last breath I was on the phone with the hospice nurse, but I was unable to talk. Just 10 minutes prior, I witnessed a miracle right there in her apartment. As she lay on the hospital bed hospice had set up for her, labored in her...

Today, February 21, the sky shines crystal clear upon Herman McCoy’s account of my birthday-or better said, my birthnight. On foot, my uncle rounded the last curve between Freeburn, Kentucky, and his home in the McCoy Bottom. A heart light with love from courting...

“Maggie wants to expand the garden this spring,” Jack said with a smile. A truck driver for thirty-seven years, you can’t call Jack a slacker. Here in the depth of February, he’s happy as a tick on an old coon dog. The surgeon gave him two new hips last November, and...

In February 1995, my father called. Caution threw up a hand. This wasn’t about my birthday. “Dad?” “You don’t know who this is?” he said in his belittling tone. “I didn’t expect you to call. You usually drop by. Are you okay?” “I need you to drive me to St. John’s...

Sometimes, I will not have walked 10 yards before the next invitation into someone’s house. It has happened so often that the motions have sort of become joyfully repetitive. I remove my shoes and step through the colorful, low-hanging doorway, sit on the raised bed...