Category: 2023

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, . . . is the first portion of the opening line from A Tale of Two Cities written by Charles Dickens. The line goes on with several more contrasts and contradictions to describe the time period the book is set in. Here is […]

Grief is a word I didn’t want to deal with.  Yet here I am walking with my best friend, my twin sister through her grief.  I remember walking with her as her husband was in the hospital and being the optimistic person that I am, planning a party for when he got out.  Unfortunately that […]

In many ways going through life after the death of a spouse is like trying to navigate through a minefield. There are so many things that can trigger moments of tears and sobbing. Sometimes the mines are easy to spot and we can plan around them and be ready to make a path around them. […]

When Ben and I got married 24 years ago we recited the traditional vows. “In sickness and health, until death parts us”. During the wedding ceremony we exchanged rings as a symbol of our love and commitment to each other. I never usually wore my wedding ring at home. But I would always grab it […]

Every day is hard, some are harder. That is one thing that I tell people who want to know how I am doing or how things are going for us. At the beginning of the summer we got no rain. That meant that the grass didn’t grow and was pretty brown. Once we got some […]

For as many summers as we were able, we would travel to northern Wisconsin to spend a week at the cottage Ben spent many summers at growing up. In those growing up years he would spend two months or more in the Northwoods. He had the advantage of his mother being a schoolteacher so she […]

The saying goes that hindsight is 20/20. If I knew the things I now know, I would have made many decisions differently over the years. If I had only known what the future held and how things would turn out in my life, I would have done many things differently. The phrase “if I had […]

I received two peace lily plants from friends when Ben died. I have never been one to keep plants alive. I killed succulents. Those are supposed to be hard to kill and easy to care for. I nearly killed off my peace lilies too. I had put them in the kitchen and would forget to […]

Have you ever looked forward to something so much that it felt like time was going very slow? And that the time would never get here? Or maybe you were going through something traumatic or terribly life changing like a messy divorce? There was an endpoint for each of those things. There was a day […]

I bought this sign a few weeks before Easter. Once St. Patrick’s Day was over, I hung it on my front door where it is currently still hanging. I was looking for a wreath or something tinsely to hang on the door. Hobby Lobby didn’t have anything I liked until I saw this. For Christmas […]