My Great Grandmother, who was a farmer's daughter and a farmer's wife carried the heavy weight of raising her siblings after her mother died in the flu pandemic of 1918. Then carried the weight of raising her own five children along with helping to run the family farm. By the time, during my childhood, that I knew her, she was well into her eighties, living in the city, but still carrying so much weight. She put up provisions filling the basement shelves with luscious jars of fruits and vegetables. My Great Granny looked as you might imagine grey hair, round as a dumpling, most days...

                   So much of the change that comes with age is subtle until it isn't. Lately, I am noticing more and more the differences in my skin and wondering what that means about what is going on below the surface. I keep hearing Phoebe Snow's lyrics from her song Either or Both of Me :                   "Sometimes this face looks so funny  I hide it behind a book But sometimes this face has so much classThat I have to sneak a second look" This seesaw of...

Writing for the Washington Post Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan titled their piece about Jimmy Carter The Un-Celebrity President, it turns out he is way more than that.  Those of us who remember the Carter presidency know that it was fraught and included a few major blunders and miscalculations. Now they may be viewed as honest mistakes. Since leaving office Jimmy and his wife of 70 years Rosalynn have led exemplary lives. "The 39th president of the United States lives modestly, a sharp contrast to his successors, who have left the White House to embrace power of another kind: wealth."   When fifty-six-year-old Jimmy Carter returned home...

In 1958 a scientist name Eugene N. Parker believed in the existence of what he called solar wind, as a 31 year old professor at the University of Chicago , he was almost completely alone in his belief.  This was at a time when what we knew about our solar system was information gleaned from what we could see from earth. Kenneth Chang of the New York Times quotes Dr. Parker as saying, “The prevailing view among some people was that space was absolutely clean, nothing in it, total vacuum.”  "Four years later, Dr. Parker was vindicated when Mariner 2, a...

There are many innovations and design revelations that, though intended for one group or purpose, have benefitted us all. (See my previous blog about Curb Cuts).  The one that has been touted as bringing new life to independent living as we age is voice-activated technology. Amazingly, it has been less than 8 years since Apple bought us Siri, five years since Amazon brought us Alexa, and  4 years since Microsoft launched Cortana. Even those of us who don't have a smart speaker home device has gotten used to the fact that we can speak to a machine and it will answer back...