The truck had apparently shuffled off this mortal coil and departed for the Great Parking Lot in the Sky.

Unfortunately, insurance does not simply hand you a machine and say, “Congratulations on your commitment to oxygen. Sleep well.”

I investigated Panama with the same level of enthusiasm one might expect from a hog searching for truffles. To say I did “some research” would be like saying a skunk produces “some odor.”

Going out to eat with Eve is not dining. It is an event. Possibly one requiring permits.

The show doesn’t just tell you that something was off—it shows you the cause and effect. He said this. They felt that. Here’s why. It’s exaggerated, of course. It’s a sitcom. But underneath the humor, there’s a kind of clarity that’s hard to find in real life.

Her frustration was usually there, like living with a volcano; rumblings sometimes, pyroclastic flow sometimes, rocks and ash flying through the air sometimes.

Last summer I would take my coffee out to the porch and watch the sun come up before starting my workday. It felt like getting ahead of things. Quiet, ordered, slightly smug.

We live in the country. Snakes are a fact of life. I appreciate their presence, actually, living under our home, hopefully keeping the wild rodents out of our house. Rodents eat people food and are quite destructive about it. Snakes do not. Snakes eat those pesky rodents.

I was raised in the era of don’t air your dirty laundry in public. Your problems were your problems. The rest of the world didn’t need to hear about them—and, more importantly, didn’t particularly want to.

There is a particular kind of anxiety that doesn’t show up during the day. It waits.

A few days ago, for instance, there was a lightning bolt along the left side of my vision. Not metaphorically. I mean an honest-to-goodness jagged streak of light, as though Zeus had taken a small personal interest in my optic nerve.

Too many women fall into the habit of doing and doing and doing—making the plans, smoothing the arguments, offering the kindness, extending the understanding. After a while they’re tired. But by then they’ve invested so much effort that walking away feels like admitting all that work was wasted.

We arise early most days, between 4 and 5 a.m., and leisurely go through a couple of cups each while reading what interests us on our respective glowing devices. Every so often, one of us will share something we’re reading and a discussion may ensue.

Ageism. Is it real? I mean, does the age of a person make a difference as to the weight of his/her/its opinion?

What surprised me most was not the forgetting itself, but the effort required to think. Cognitive work began to feel costly. Tasks that once ran automatically now demanded preparation and recovery. Mental stamina became finite in a way it had never been before.

I love the hardware store. That is where they keep the lumber. And aside from chocolate and a few other delicacies (all of which are, coincidentally, chocolate), there are few smells more satisfying than freshly cut lumber. Especially if you arrive at exactly the moment they’re sawing boards to order and the entire building smells like ambition and sawdust.

We’ve been trying to decide what to do about Valentine’s Day.

His target market is more likely to have opinions about wagon wheels. His book involves history. Weather. People who would find modern plumbing suspicious.

The premise is simple: fear is not hysteria or imagination. Most of the time, it’s information. It’s your brain noticing patterns faster than your conscious mind can sort them out and letting you know—often without words—that something doesn’t line up.

It was a small wedding. They had both been married before and didn’t see any reason to make a big affair of it. Family and a few close friends. Maybe fifty people, including children. They asked me to do a reading at the ceremony, which was quite an honor.