Keeping Families Together When They Fall Apart — My local fish market, owned by a generous-spirited, good-hearted Italian, started making gefilte fish for Rosh Hashanah several years back. Having grown up in a household where it was a Passover-only staple — homemade and delicious as it gets — only recently did I learn that for many Jews around…

My husband has a thing for Nazi movies, old black and white ones especially. He doesn’t have to search them out when he’s channel surfing. They find him, and into the DVR list they go. If I’m in bed with him and he stumbles on Casablanca, the surfing stops. Any…

Lifelong reverberations of moments written on the body On a Mother’s Day many years ago, I got the supreme gift of watching my daughter ride a two-wheeler on her own for the first time. The training wheels had recently been taken off and for weeks I would run alongside, one…

New Year’s Eve 2021, a night almost like any other. I open a bottle of smooth red wine, perfect for the meatball-and-spaghetti dinner in the works, my husband’s favorite meal. I pump up the volume, the “West Side Story” soundtrack, instant gratification made possible by Apple Music. Doesn’t matter that…

The opening sequence of Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give” is a laugh-out-loud montage that rings poignantly true to any woman (and that’s most of us over fifty) who dutifully puts herself through the annual or biannual torturing of the breast otherwise known as a mammogram. …

Several years back I got a birds-eye view of Dancing with the Stars, one of the perks of having a daughter who worked for the show at the time. If it’s a little like being in a glitzy ballroom at a bar mitzvah or wedding, that’s probably the point. …

It is the height of summer in the Northeast, a night cool enough to turn off the AC, open the door to my bedroom deck, let the outside in. Immediately I’m captivated by the symphony of cicadas and katydids and crickets playing counterpoint to each other. During the day the…

July 1985. I’m behind the counter of an East Hampton design shop that husband opened with the man who would have been his partner had he not died. It’s Saturday night. We play Frank Sinatra music, always a draw. It had all the markings of a good plan, set in…

More than once, especially during the darkest 2020 pandemic months, online conversations re: why bother wearing lipstick came my way. Maybe sheltering in place made many of us skip the makeup most of the time. My mirror mirror on the wall asked for a touch of color on my eyes…