All The Home Forum
- My Oregon Trail: Trekking from Boston with $200 and a bikeI was young and needed a fresh start, our essayist writes. So I headed to Oregon from Boston on a bike.
- An inauspicious beginning, a bountiful end"Plastic trash, weeds, and old tires greeted us at our garden plot," our essayist writes. "Sweat and nature would prevail."
- Confessions of a rapid-fire texterGroup texts may help families and friends stay in touch, but sometimes the ability to respond instantly poses its own problems, our essayist writes.
- Mother of all secrets: When the CIA’s top-ranked woman is your momIt’s good to be enigmatic if you work for the CIA. But as her daughter, it took decades for me to understand.
- Love and patience, I discover, go hand in paw"I like to think I have an affinity for befriending animals. But Rocky was a difficult case," our essayist writes
- The perfect garden? I’ve learned to leave it to nature.In spring, a gardener’s fancy turns to thoughts of creating a perfect garden. But one person’s perfection is another’s jungle.
- The case for running an analog errandShopping, banking, and book-borrowing can be done digitally — but at the cost of kind words and friendly smiles along the way, our essayist writes.
- A lesson in fences and freedom from Royal the horseMy life felt bound by domestic chores, our essayist writes. Then a friend asked, “What do you do for fun?”
- Awash in a sea of shampooI have fulfilled this role, the consumer of my wife's rejected shampoo, for my entire married life, our essayist writes.
- What’s to be done with a recliner in decline?Two cats and 35 years later, it’s lost some shine. OK, a lot of shine, our essayist writes. But it still works.
- It’s 19 below zero and the bird feeder is empty. What’s a birder to do?People who maintain bird feeders are trading seeds for delight. Sometimes that exchange is inconvenient, and sometimes it’s unexpectedly life-giving.
- I make peace with my procrastinationFor years I took pride in arriving on the dot – sometimes to the mild chagrin of my host, author Robert Klose writes in an essay.
- What my mama told me, and when I finally heard itMy mom told me that “a to-do list is like a mental compass that you use to navigate the ocean of junk inside your head,” our essayist writes.
- Everybody salsa!Decades later it might have qualified as a flash mob, but on this day in 1983 it was a simply a spontaneous outpouring.
- As English evolves, I’m increasingly stumpedI teach at a university. One of the “problems” this presents is that, as the years pass, I get older, but my students remain the same age.
- A curlicue of hope for cursive writingWhen my grandson was about 8, he watched me as I penned a letter to a friend. “How do you do that?” he asked, his brow furrowed.
- In defense of punctuation, a texter’s lamentIf prose is music, punctuation is its notation. So what to make of the younger generations’ fondness for punctuation-free texts?
- Reliability took a back seat to style and priceMy first car would be one of many I owned that had mechanical quirks and character traits that forced me to adapt, improvise, and grow.
- When hills become mountains, and other life lessons from childhoodMy old house and the public pool both seemed smaller now that I had grown up, our essayist writes. But not the hill in the park.
- Bats are cool, snakes splendid: I’m on the lookout for Sudden Dave“Much of what people believe about spiders or bats amounts to slander,” our essayist writes. “We usually have to be taught what to fear.”