Budgeting in Japan takes ingenuity

Budgeting in Japan takes ingenuity

“Exchange rate” does not mean much in our workaday lives.  But we develop a functional understanding in short order when traveling abroad.  There it hits home that “exchange rate” is “money,” a term so meaningful that it runs a close second to whatever is in first...

SMART STEPS FOR STEPPARENTS

The toughest job in the world isn’t being a mother, it’s being a stepmother. I’ve weathered a divorce, reinvented myself as a “new” woman, and even survived a fat childhood. But nothing compares with the rigors of my improvised role as stepmother to two teenage...
A NIGHT IN LIMB-O

A NIGHT IN LIMB-O

Washington, D.C., writer Carla Seaquist wrote this essay after an evening spent in an emergency room waiting to be treated. So I say to the man seated next to me in the emergency room, “This isn’t so much Bedlam as ‘Bad-limb.’” By some strange symmetry, appropriate...
RECOVERY OF A FAMILY’S PAST

RECOVERY OF A FAMILY’S PAST

What the madeleine conjured for Proust, Ohio conjures for me: memories of hot and happy summers on my grandparents’ farm where I, a “townie” from the West Coast, milked cows, gathered eggs, caught fireflies, made dolls from hollyhocks and nightly with Grandma whipped...
AROUND THE BLOCK WITH A DYING MAN

AROUND THE BLOCK WITH A DYING MAN

Lacey, WA. Life, an improvised affair, rarely has the unity or clarity of Art. Our conflicts seldom resolve or even, as Drama prescribes, “stay in the moment.” And our prose: Instead of paragraphs cohering around a single idea, we speak in fragments, non sequiturs,...