Sitting at my husband's hospital bedside recently, I marveled at the changes I saw in nursing since I retired just seventeen years ago. I know I sound really old, but here's a list of what I saw being done differently: The endless use of gloves: I only wore gloves if a patient was in isolation. …
Coincidence Anecdotes for the New Year
"Room 373," the hotel clerk said. I sighed with relief. I'd been staying at numerous hotels in the past year and trying to remember room numbers had become a nuisance. But 373 instantly registered as the number of the hymn, Beautiful Savior, in the red Psalter Hymnal of the church of my childhood. The hymn …
Write Along with Me #6: The Story You Need to Tell
"At some point you will be knocked to the ground. Every one of us will." With that statement, Sandra Marinella starts her book titled The Story You Need to Tell: Writing to Heal from Trauma, Illness, or Loss. (2017. New World Library: CA). I came across this book last week while perusing Amazon for books …
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Write Along With Me #5: “As if…”
I've never been clever using as if's or as though's in my writing. I don't, for example, easily make comparisons between wet socks and flopped cakes or fallen trees and failed exams or heads full of curls and gardens over-planted with chrysanthemums. So, once again, I was pleasantly overwhelmed by a book I just finished …
Growing Older: Relationships
We've just returned from a trip to MN, followed by a trip "back east" to Michigan and Chicago, to see family that included my first visit back to the cemetery where my sister Esther was buried last April. Bittersweet, for sure. And we saw a lot of friends. Just before those trips, I hosted a …
An Apple Hobby
What do neighbors, gas stations, construction sites, churches, and nonprofit homeless shelters have in common? No guess? Each has been the site of repeated visits from my husband this fall in his second year of apple picking. After a lot of non-farm activity in our eleven years of living in downtown Chicago, last fall, during …
Mental Illness Awareness Week – 2017
Take a minute this week to pray for those who are living with a mental illness. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), one in four adults--approximately 60 million Americans--experiences a mental health disorder in a given year, so we don't have to look far. Last Sunday, I attended the 25th Annual Candlelight …
The Move (10) — Musings at a Year
Are you someone who does not feel old but has awakened one day to discover you are old? Do you know you’re entering another phase of life but don’t know what to think about it? Are you facing life with no career plan after living a life filled with plans? I hope if you’re like …
Write What You Don’t Know #2: The Vasa
Until last week, I'd never heard of the Vasa Then, suddenly, when some folks knew we'd be in Stockholm, I got advice that we must go to the Vasa Museum. So today we did. First, we met with our Viking Representative stationed in the lobby of our Radisson Blu at the Waterfront We asked how …
Write What You Don’t Know
The Baltic region of the world. That's one of many things I don't know. I'm there now, and I remember when I first started writing in 2000, I was taught to write what you know. Easy. I knew then how to learn to write a book and get it published. I knew about nursing, city living, …
Write Along with Me 