After her son witnesses his father's tragic death, Katelyn Landers quits her high-powered banking career as a financial analyst and moves with her son back to her family home in Georgia. She hopes life in the Low Country, among the barrier islands and marshes she played in as a child will provide the perfect place for … Continue reading Changing Tides

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in the New York Times, “Is Your Child Lying to You? That’s Good.” Two sentences into the article, I started grousing about scientists spending gazillions of our hard-earned tax dollars to prove what I, and probably most parents know intuitively: given the opportunity, KIDS LIE! Even … Continue reading Imagination or Big Fat Whopper?

  My husband claims girls are sneakier and more devious than boys. I’d like to argue but somehow making a case that the door chime being turned off had nothing to do with our sixteen-year-old daughter arriving home an hour past curfew, fell apart somewhere between my brain and my mouth. And to be honest, … Continue reading Surviving Big Sisters

  Living in Florida guarantees slithering squatters will take up residence in your yard now and then. I’ve never known anyone who liked snakes. Well, there was this one guy I knew in high school named Roger who had a pet snake. Roger was cute, but even if I could get past the fact he … Continue reading The Only Good Snake is a Dead Snake

  My husband and I were in Tokyo the day we learned the oldest son and his wife were expecting twins. Junior had joined us on our business trip and learned of his impending double-bundles of joy when he called his wife back in the States. The next morning, we met Junior for breakfast and … Continue reading Two Unique Souls United by Birth

The other day I was thinking about our family, the differences, and the similarities. We have our cool family members, and then we have the engineers. The engineer members might not be professional engineers, but they could be. They share the same personality traits. Even some of the grandchildren still in grade school fall into … Continue reading Cool Versus Engineer

My husband and I live squarely in the world of blended families. He had four sons when we married, and we have a daughter. Add in eleven grandkids and when our gang gets together we have twenty-one unique personalities in the same house. And we're an animal-loving group, so we also have the nine dogs, … Continue reading There’s Cool and then There’s Circus Cool

When I think of reincarnation, defined as the rebirth of a soul in a new body, one of my granddaughters is my personal case study. While DNA, our inherited characteristics such as blood groups, or hair color, or eye color, might be interesting, it's not mystifying. Mystifying is the granddaughter my husband calls Precious. Her emotional bond … Continue reading A Case for Reincarnation

  I’ve always loved the idea of karma. It seems fair and just that our future is determined by our past actions, good and bad. The nicer you are, the better your life. But what if someone inadvertently does something horrible? What then? Are they still destined for a terrible fate? This conundrum awakened me … Continue reading Karma, Koi, and Kindergarten