Columns

If you have been blessed like me to have been with the same partner a long time—24 years of marriage for us—you know it takes compromise, humor and patience to get there. Maybe it’s not always a sunny walk in the park, but getting through those times of turmoil really...

Pretty much since day one, I’ve had this same desk, chair and cubicle here at the Tri-City Times offices. I’ve tacked a calendar in its designated spot for the last 16 years and that towering stack of our print editions has maintained its claim on the corner edge. I...

Recently there was a post on social media that read, “Feeling the need to be busy all the time is a trauma response and fear-based distraction from what you’d be forced to acknowledge and feel if you slowed down.” Immediately, I knew this was meant for me. Since...

In Granny’s latter years, we’d sit at her kitchen table as night fell upon the mountains. There, in those hallowed moments, she unlocked the chambers of her large heart and granted me her most precious joys and sorrows. She spoke of her two newborn sons Grandpa buried...

Catherine Minolli has contributed to a little over 1,300 issues of the Tri-City Times. She has edited and written sad, inspirational and happy, mundane and hard hitting stories in all those issues. Catherine will be retiring after 25 years of dedicated service to our...

If there’s one thing I learned over the years behind the keyboard it’s the fact that every single person has a story. There’s an entire library of information inside every person’s head that shapes their life, defines their being and illuminates their core. I’ve had...

Oh, the air wafted sweetly from the sea. Not like the humid, oppressive torpor of Vietnam: lighter, crisper. With the sun kissing my face, I walked amid the amber wheat, the green pastures and the rolling hills, walking, becoming lost in the brambles and then found...

Who couldn’t love newborn autumn in Michigan? With summer vacations archived in photos and memories, we flock again to high school and college football fields to cheer our team to victory. Alumni, students, and parents clap to the beat of marching bands. In small to...

I have managed, so far at least, to keep the fact that my retirement date is very near separate from the fact that this involves a great loss and major energetic shift. For the longest time I called myself “a writer.” From the time I was six years old I just knew I...

I am going to have to make some very difficult decisions soon. These decisions, they’re not happy ones. They’re not akin to choosing which university to attend, or where to take a vacation. Nope. These decisions are going to be quite sobering, an appropriate...