Columns

My mother and father were opposites: she the eldest of eight children, he the youngest of nine. Assigned to cooking family meals at age eleven, Mom cut her teeth on the cookstove. Dad grew into manhood with every bite of food handed to him. Domestic to the bone, Mom...

There’s nothing like visiting with old friends from your childhood that can make you wonder how time passed so quickly. Having the sad misfortune of having to say a way too early goodbye to a childhood friend has brought back so many memories. Susie was a very...

Years ago on a fair fall day, my sister-in-law and I wandered through a craft show in Grand Rapids with her first baby. Throughout the park, dappled light shone on vendors’ tents under old oaks and maples. The spirit of geniality triggered “nothing could be finer than...

Every once in a while I feel like I will hear her come in, hands full of work items, water, her bag. Always so much in her hands, it takes a few seconds for her to get through the door. I would always hear, “Hi Paula. Hi Randy. Hi Tom. Hi Maria” and whoever else was...

The kids and I spent Sunday afternoon picking apples from our four trees. It’s one of those years where, with little effort, there’s a decent crop to be had. Despite the fact that I half-heartedly pruned and sprayed them this spring and they went long spells without a...

Barely a year old, Mitty loves books. She jumps upon my bed every morning, rubs her cheeks on the edge of my journal and chews its ribbon glued to the binding. She paws my pen. “Okay, Mitts, I get the message.” I scratch her back from tail to head and hold her face in...

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...