My husband loved a soft boiled egg in an egg cup, sliced perfectly and scooped out steaming hot. My daughter prefers those laid by the folks at Cadbury, but I love Easter eggs. Pink, green, lavender, blown out or hard-boiled, I love them all. Dyeing eggs is something I carry with me to this day. As a child, we dyed eggs on Good Friday with Paas dye and then painted them with watercolors, gouache and even oil paint. We glued on bits of fabric and encircled them with lace. I once colored the ... View the Post
Who is This Person I Have Become?
Just the other night, I turned the corner into my driveway and it stirred a memory that took me back to those first few years of being married with very small children. It had become a sort of ritual for me, a harried mother who would use the guise of taking the garbage to the bottom of my driveway as a "mommy's time out," once the children were tucked into their beds. My neighbors probably scratched their heads as I stood there for several minutes stretching, taking deep breaths of the night ... View the Post
Woodbine 7-5109
Cathy, a Grown and Flown friend, writes: There are a few numbers that have been indelibly burned in memory. My social security number (to the amazement of my daughter) and my childhood telephone number, Woodbine 7-5109. Where I was raised, the phone numbers had the names of trees, shrubs and flowers. Ours was the woodbine, a shrubby vine in the honeysuckle family. Perfect for my mother, a city girl and inveterate gardener. Growing up, I watched her fearlessly prune climbing roses, snip boughs ... View the Post
Stay a Little Longer
A Grown and Flown friend writes: I really never dreamed of moving from our current home during the empty nest phase. This decision, I believe, was based on my experience with my own parent’s home. Ironically, while most empty nesters downsize their homes my parents just kept upsizing. The home I grew up in was a four bedroom colonial with two and a half baths on about a half an acre of property. To me, it never felt small, it always felt just right. However, the house aged and instead of ... View the Post
Driving Tonka Trucks Home
Looking back, it was naive of me to wish my little boy’s goal might be to memorize the periodic table. What inexperienced mother doesn’t fantasize that her child channel Albert Einstein? Instead, my three-year-old, a great lover of Tonka trucks, had an early predilection to recite the names of construction vehicles. Rather than identifying chemical elements and their properties, was my prepubescent prodigy destined to become a truck driver instead? I knew absolutely nothing about his ... View the Post
Selling the Nest
A Grown and Flown friend writes: I’m not big on change. Growing up in Brooklyn, I lived in the same house until I left for college. This was long before it was cool to live in Brooklyn, and I never looked back. When I graduated from college, I spent almost nine years in the same apartment in Manhattan. After I married and we bought our first house in the suburbs, our nest, and we stayed there twenty years. In spite of the terrible market, we listed our house for sale as my ... View the Post