In the inky-colored darkness before dawn, the birds start their chorus. The silence and stillness of the night are broken with their tapestry of song. Researchers think the reason birds sing each morning is to let other birds know they have made it to another day. It’s...
I recently took the girls to the library for curbside book pickup. A librarian asked if we would like some packets of vegetable seeds for planting. This was an unexpected and unknown perk of the library system. New books and a gardening project. The girls were thrilled....
We just completed a 3,000-piece puzzle. To make it a little extra challenging, we decided to put it together without using the box as a guide. Sometimes, our eyes would immediately see a correct piece and fit it in with a satisfying snap. Other times, we...
Back in the pre-Covid days, when I used to drive the girls to and from school, we would see a woman in our neighborhood out for morning and afternoon walks.Every day, our paths would converge in nearly the same spot – she walking, us driving. Every...
We’ve been playing a family game of Monopoly. The game board sits in the middle of our kitchen table. After playing for a little while each evening, we tuck our property cards and money under the board. The next evening, after dinner, we pick up...
"What do you need from me?" the sheriff asked."Walk with us," the people replied.And he said, "Let's walk." Many years ago, Margaret Mead, the late anthropologist, was asked by a student what she considered to be the very first sign of civilization in culture. The student...
The other day, I clicked on a New York Times article detailing the nearly 100,000 lives lost to date in the U.S. from Covid. Names and memories were gathered from obituaries across the nation to capture the gravity of the loss and personalize the people...
Emma has been reading Charlotte’s Web every night for weeks. She pulls it off her nightstand immediately after I kiss her goodnight. In the morning, I usually find it lying next to her, wrapped in the covers. She finishes it only to begin again. “You really...
Now that the weather is warm, we are spending more of our quarantine time outside. The girls spent the morning swimming in the backyard while I worked on my laptop on the patio. The streets are so quiet. Usually we can hear road noise from our...
This week, Emma’s at-home science lesson was about flamingos and how they become pink in color because of all the shrimp they eat. Emma liked this fact quite a bit and opened the refrigerator to see the foods we had inside and think about which...