Forty is such a special time in a woman's life. Age spots blossom on your hands, your back aches for no reason, and if you're truly fortunate, you may begin to develop soft, jiggly jowls that small children can treat like Play-Doh. Yes, you're about to experience some wonderful developments! But don't be alarmed by the changes in your body as you mature from a young, vibrant woman to stale, middle-age goods. Some women may start this transition earlier than 40, and some may start later, so remember it's not a contest. It's all a natural part of growing old and being cast aside by society, a process every beautiful woman endures 30 or 40 years before finally dying. Perhaps the greatest rite of passage after turning 40 is going for your first annual mammogram. Also known as taking your sweater puppies to the vet, having your cans x-rayed every 12 months is an important screening exam to check for pesky cancer cells that can invade a woman's most private parts...

There's a saying in Texas that many (too many) women adhere to: "The bigger the hair, the closer to God."  But there's a lesser-known assertion that many teenagers believe: "The bigger the mum, the more you are loved."  In the Lonestar State, homecoming is not just about a football game under a wide twilit sky, a dance in a gym bedecked with ribbons and balloons, or dressing up in fancy clothes with your friends. It's about homecoming mums. Huge, showy homecoming mums. Legend has it that fall-blooming chrysanthemum corsages have been part of the homecoming tradition since the first homecoming football game, celebrated in Missouri in 1911. Back then, a male would bestow this gift to his female date to wear during the festivities that celebrated returning alumni and residents. Texas being Texas, they took it up a few notches. In 1936, a florist added school-color ribbons to the traditional corsage for a Baylor homecoming game. And a Texas icon was born.  ...

I see those parents dropping off their cherished children at college. I see photos of the family minivan - so recently scattered with Cheerios and Happy Meal toys - now filled to the windows with clothes, bedding, and furniture. I see dads manning a push-cart full of belongings up a sidewalk and into a dorm elevator. I see moms helping their children make the twin-sized bed, unfurl the curtains across the window, fold into drawers the clothes that suddenly seem so big and still so small. I see fierce goodbye hugs laced with tears, parents telling children to call home every single day to check in. A complicated potpourri of pride and joy and grief and embarrassment.  And I remember how my going-off-to-college experience looked nothing like that.  As a child of parents who couldn't be relied upon, I mostly did it alone. My dorm, 1998 I suppose I always assumed I'd go to college. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I'd been told over and over that colleg...

It was at least 200 degrees under the shade trees of Central Pennsylvania, where I had just arrived to spend four glorious days at Writer Camp. Despite sitting on the Allegheny Plateau a thousand feet up, the temperature was high and the air felt soupy. Like it would be faster to swim than walk from one end of camp to the other. Either way, I'd end up soaking wet.  In the shared bunkhouse where I would sleep, it was a hundred degrees hotter. Cool air blowing from the window unit in the sitting area rarely made its way up to my top bunk beneath the slanted ceiling. I knew this going in, but I was still offended at the heat that blew back at me when I tossed my pillow, portable mini fan, and phone charger onto the bed. I hung a white towel, furnished by the camp, on the wooden post of the bunk, knowing it would never fully dry between showers. The problem Becky, camp coordinator extraordinaire, had kindly left two Andes chocolate mint candies on the bunk of each camper as a welcome g...

Once upon a time, on the zippered edge where two cities meet, there was a bra.  It was a bra of unremarkable color - darker than beige but lighter than mocha - whose cups stood proud if lonesome. It was a bra of indeterminate size - bigger than an A cup but smaller than Milwaukee. It was a bra with a story.  *Actual bra not pictured One May afternoon this bra suddenly found itself lounging in the westbound lane of Center Ridge Road, not far from a Taco Bell restaurant. Its hook-side pointed to one zip code; its eye-side, another. It was out of place in so many ways. But how did it get there?  Did it take flight from atop a load of laundry traveling in a cracked plastic hamper in the back seat of a 1998 Toyota Corolla, soaring through a rolled-down window to exciting lands unknown?  Had it been hastily stuffed into the cup holder of a late-model Mercedes during a moment of stolen passion, after which incriminating evidence had to be hastily discarded? Was it torn from...

I was in the car on a Thursday night, driving my two kids to soccer practices. At a stop light, my daughter said from the back seat, "Momma, I have a question for you, and I need you to tell me the truth."  I braced myself. I thought this was going to be one of those serious questions about life, the universe, and everything. Maybe about how babies get in the belly or whether Santa is real.  Instead, she threw me for a completely different loop.  "You know how you don't do hard things all day long like moving heavy stuff or running all day or something? So...why are you so tired all the time?" Oh, child. Let me tell you why.  I explained that there is a difference between physical tiredness - from playing soccer or moving heavy things all day - and something called the mental load. Like it or not, women - especially mothers - still carry most of the mental load, and it is exhausting. It's five hundred small decisions every day that affect a thousand other th...

Dear Dan and Andrew and Rob and Aneesa and Jake, Hello, it's me again. The woman who calls the congressman's office nearly every weekday to complain or comment on whatever political issue made yesterday's headlines. As an intern, you have the unfortunate job of picking up the phone.  From my pile of non-responses I know you're tired of my daily calls. I can hear it in your voices when you assure me that you'll pass my concerns to the congressman - even before I tell you my opinion on the issue I've called about that particular day.  I know you're bored with my calls. I can tell by the way the ice clinks in your plastic tumbler as you sip your drink while I'm ranting, then coolly tell me you're just an office worker. When your response is flat and monotone, when I can hear your exhale echo in the handset speaker, when you say you've written down all my concerns, I doubt your truthfulness. I bet when the phones ring around 9:15 every week day, you ...

It waits. In January, my sixth-grader missed his first middle school dance. He had really wanted to attend this masquerade-themed party for three local parish schools. I confirmed with his friends' moms that they would be there. He designed a mask made to look like a monster character he has written about for a Young Authors book. I helped him bring it to life.  The plan (top) and the execution (bottom) He was all set to have a great time. And then: the flu. On the Wednesday before the Friday dance, he came home early from school feeling queasy. By dinner time he was dealing with nausea, a stuffy head, runny nose, a slight cough, and a 102-degree fever. He hardly moved off the couch for the next two days. When he asked through a fatigued haze if he could still go to the dance, I had to break the bad news that he could not. Tears dripped down his flushed cheeks. My heart ached for him, because I had wallowed through that kind of disappointment. But mine has an embarrassing story att...

There is no headstone. No rectangular concrete marker with a rounded edge across the top to blunt the grief. No carved heart of incongruously shiny granite, no lichen-embossed urn to hold flowers and remind me of my emptiness. There are no words carved indelibly to remind anyone that she was. My mother wanted to be cremated, and have her ashes scattered in the mountains. She thought funerals were barbaric, all those people hovering over an expensive coffin holding a person who's gone, all that wailing and swaying, all that sadness.  She hated the idea of people coming to sit at a marker to mourn her. Celebrate, she said, because I've gone somewhere better. No use being sad. Perhaps she didn't understand that funerals and graves and headstones aren't for the dead. They're for the living. For the ones left behind who have nothing to hold but air and memories. For the ones who are left with no way to prove their loved one existed except this box she rested in for a whi...

The Little Limes were beautiful. In early summer, the so-called-petite hydrangeas sprouted thick green leaves and a profusion of pale green blossoms that faded to white then pink. Their light scent drifted around the patio attracting winged things.  After winter set in for good, the leaves broke off but the blooms dried into shades of caramel, sand, and chestnut that lingered on the stalks. Then the brittle blossoms swayed against the white snow. Yes, they were beautiful. For another time, another garden, a life where no one perpetually needed to pass through. Here, now, they were flower-heavy and weight-bent and wild-grown. I tried to tame them, really I did. Every spring I trimmed the shrubs down to a diameter of less than two feet. I wound a circular tomato plant trellis around each bush to coax it to carry its own weight. And I spoke sweetly to them, asking them to please bloom upright like their rosebush neighbors and not crowd the patio stepping stones. Please - be polite, be...