Never invite a French bartender to your house. I learned this the hard way. But my passport says I am older and wiser now. My late husband and I spent the better part of a week in Paris in the ’70s, ensconced on the top floor of a rooming house that rented to tourists like us – with ...

I am a word nerd. I enjoy using words, playing with words, learning about words, reading words cobbled together in sentences and paragraphs and novels. As a student of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, I often research words in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek. I find it ...

The only constant is change Men don’t like change. I think I’m turning into an old man. In my early married life, when I wanted to change something in the house, my late husband, Tom, would say, “What do you mean, change? Paint the living room? We just painted it a couple of years ...

We are all living in extraordinarily difficult and dangerous times, kind of stumbling our way through this unprecedented and epic pandemic which in so many ways has turned our lives upside down. When facing challenges of this scale, Americans have typically risen to the occasion and come ...

If you drive around northeastern Pennsylvania, you’ll notice the ubiquitous presence of roadside signs marking a seemingly endless succession of boroughs and townships. Luzerne County alone has 76 municipal jurisdictions, including four cities. In the region’s industrial past, the ...

Every morning, as I pick up my newspaper, I always check the obituaries first. No, it’s not because of the old joke that I am checking to see if my name is there. Now that I am getting long in the tooth, I realize that my contemporaries are also aging. Like all of us, I check on my friends ...