I have been trying, this week, to understand the significance of the new guidelines for breast cancer screening. As near as I can figure, the new recommendations are that women in their 40s not get mammograms, and that all women should stop doing...

November is a minimalist time. Stark trees. Bare ground. We have raked up the bright fallen leaves and hauled them off to the county compost heap. Pulled the dead flowers from the ground and tossed them in the bin under the bush. Inside the house, we...

Oh these feisty old ladies. They have survived so much. Doug's aunt Vi grew up in North Dakota, in a farmhouse with a dirt floor. She had seven or eight brothers and sisters, and when the oldest girl died in childbirth, her baby was taken in and raised...

Guv served with the U.S. Army Air Force (as it was then known) in World War II. I know almost nothing about what he did or where he was, other than the vague understanding that he was in South Asia--Thailand, and India--and, for some reason, served...

While we were raking leaves yesterday, I kept stealing glances at the compost bin. I really should empty that thing, I thought. What a failure it was. We bought the bin a year or two ago--it's plain and rectangular, made of black plastic. (You can see...