On a January morning of this year, the body of a woman in her sixties was found floating in the river several yards from my door. She was discovered by two men who had been working for several hours on righting my houseboat, which had Read More …
When my mother was in her mid-nineties, she began asking a lot of scientific questions: Why is the sky blue? What’s inside of a cloud? How does that crow over there pecking at a MacDonald’s French fry dropped on the side of the road recognize Read More …
My mother and I stood in line behind the third oldish-daughter-with-old-mother unit I’d seen since entering the grocery store. The mother ahead of us was tall, late 80s, thin and weak looking but sharp-eyed. She turned to give appraising glances at the weary, preoccupied string Read More …
All morning I’ve been sitting in my kitchen contemplating a switch from my life as a writer to a more secure life of crime. I decided to Google around to see what sort of lucrative criminal trouble old women can get into and found headlines that Read More …
I’ve known about ageism for a long time, but I received my first real shock about its pervasiveness in the office of one of Portland’s top-rated gerontologists. I was accompanying my mother, Alice, who was ninety-four at the time, to her first appointment. The doctor Read More …
We were four children: Bruce, Michael, Andrea, and Marla, but when I was thirteen, Bruce, the oldest, died by suicide in the basement of our house in Minnesota. He was nineteen. My sister died in an institution at the age of twenty-seven. After many years Read More …
What shall I do with the scarred dresser that crossed the sea in steerage with my great-grandparents in the late 1870s? Josephine, an impoverished girl from Oslo and pregnant, made the journey with her arms crossed tightly around her belly as the baby tumbled around Read More …
At last I have a starring role. A movie came out last year with Sally Field playing me and now I see it’s streaming on Amazon. An even wider audience! I’m thrilled. You’ve caught me in countless other movies but in minor parts: the old Read More …
One day Liza, who has cut my hair for twenty years, stopped using my name and started calling me Sweetie all the time. Nothing had changed except that the two faces in the mirror before us had gotten older. She was approaching her mid-forties when Read More …
When you’re old and you happen to speak the words “I’m old,” out loud, many people are quick to disagree. “You’re not old!” they insist, a signal of their feelings, known or buried, that being old is not a good thing. To them, old is Read More …