On May 17th, exactly 33 years after I graduated high school, my baby girl turned her graduation tassel, too. Her service dog Mac, dressed in a matching cap and gown, trotted along beside her as she crossed the stage to receive her diploma. They both graduated with honors, and Mac received the “seal of biliteracy” on his diploma because he is fluent in understanding both dogs and humans. So, it’s official, my friends. The three kids I’ve written about for more than 20 years are now high school graduates. And that means Tom and I will have three kids in college by this fall. (Send prayers and lottery tickets.) I didn’t cry when Kate’s older brothers graduated high school. When […]

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Sleep is beautiful. But the physical act of sleeping isn’t. That’s why I roll my eyes during rom-com movies when the man wakes up early (yeah, right) to gaze adoringly at the woman he loves while she sleeps. Little does he know that she’s not sleeping. She’s acting. She’s doing her best impression of Sleeping Beauty from a Disney movie she watched in the 80s. And she knows he’s watching. It’s not dreamland. It’s deliberate posing. She probably woke up an hour ago to brush her teeth and hair before silently slipping back into bed so she’d be ready for this princess-perfect performance. But here in the real world, when the cameras aren’t rolling and the handsome prince isn’t watching, […]

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Welcome to the year of the bug. We’re just in time to witness two giant broods of cicadas rising from the ground like a horde of zombie bugs. How many zombie bugs? Definitely billions. But most likely trillions. There’s no official tree-to-tree cicada census, so it’s hard to be sure. But we’re sure they’re here because they’re loud – so loud that some people have called the police to make noise complaints about the roaring, whining sound that scientists say registers at about the same decibel level as a lawnmower or a jet flying overhead. No matter how noisy it gets, police can’t do anything about it. There’s not enough departmental funding to buy teeny tiny cicada handcuffs that only […]

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Those yellow-bellied dusty devils are at it again. They’ve launched their annual full-scale attack, and no amount of antihistamines can stop them. If you’re whipping tissues out of the box faster than a Wild West gunslinger, you’re not alone. My whole family has been doing it for weeks. All of us, even the dogs, have to line up for a daily Zyrtec. We do regular snorts of allergy nasal spray. And it’s all because of the catkins. Let me formally introduce you to a meddling little menace you’ve probably seen for years but never knew its name. Catkins are those fuzzy, yellowish-brown strings that fall from trees each spring, usually in April. At first glance, you might mistake a catkin […]

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As losses go, this isn’t a big one. I shouldn’t even care. Still, I’m sad about it. It’s hard to accept that the best jeans in my closet – and possibly the world – are on their last threads. At least nothing tragic happened. By all measures, the jeans lived a good, long life. They’re dying of natural causes — namely, years of use and the friction of putting one leg in front of the other thousands of times. All those steps have led to an unfortunate hole. Why would I say goodbye to my favorite jeans over a harmless hole? Don’t some people pay crazy money for new jeans with gaping holes? Well, yes, they do. Deliberately “distressed” jeans […]

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I’m lucky that my first professional writing job was in a newsroom because it taught me something important: You don’t need a perfect environment to get work done. You don’t need silence, an organized room, a particular candle, or a big chunk of time. The newsroom was loud, messy, and full of 20 or more people, with at least a half dozen conversations happening at any one time. The old-school phones sitting on each person’s desk rang all the time. We had a police scanner that jabbered and crackled day and night. And the staccato clickety-clack of keyboards was randomly interrupted by the pop and hiss of a dozen Dr. Peppers cracking open before a deadline. Yet somehow, we managed […]

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For months now, I’ve been eating breakfast with a goose. He’s not loud or messy and doesn’t even beg for bites of my toast. He’s a low-maintenance goose, and he lives on a magnet I put on the metal breadbox in my kitchen. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have even considered bringing a silly goose into my newly remodeled kitchen. I wanted it to look “high-end.” If we were going to spend money on remodeling, I reasoned, the end result better look like something straight out of a magazine layout. For a while, it did. But time is chilling me out day by day. Circumstances sand down my rigid rules about how things should be. Life shows me how […]

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Life was at a comfortable cruising altitude, and we were happy to be along for the ride. But then it nosedived, and some unseen force shoved me and my mom into a small room and slammed the door behind us. We looked around and realized we were alone in the cockpit, expected to take control and make a thousand different decisions to safely land the plane. The only problem? We’ve never had flying lessons. It’s probably not the perfect metaphor for beginning cancer treatments, but it’s as close as I can get. The process is complex, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. After being diagnosed with colon cancer in October and recovering from a November surgery, my mom recently completed […]

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One of the side effects of having an English degree is that I remember famous works of literature – but only the weird ones. The one I’m remembering lately is extra creepy. It’s a short story told by a narrator who insists he’s just nervous, not crazy. He’s anxious because he killed an old man for a bizarre reason: He couldn’t stand the sight of the old man’s “vulture eye,” – which is a pale blue eye with a cloudy film. He became so obsessed with the old man’s eye that he’d sneak into his house at night and watch him sleep. Eventually, the old man woke up scared because this weirdo was watching him. Then the watcher heard a […]

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My mother is radioactive. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her. She’s dozing in a recliner, and the only hint that something is wrong is the sign on the door which reads “Caution: Radioactive materials.” In about half an hour, a nurse will escort her down the hall and put her on a table that slides into a donut-shaped machine. Today is my mom’s first PET scan. I wish a PET scan was as pleasant as its name implies. I wish it was for cute pictures of beagles and basset hounds. But this kind of PET scan happens weeks after a doctor walks into a room and says something completely unexpected: “We found a mass.” Generally speaking, you never […]

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