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For me trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone…They ...

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You know it’s going to be a rough night when the caregiver for your parent who is leaving after a six hour shift, says to you, “Good luck!” And so another in a years-long series of nights taking ...

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There’s a certain pathos about getting older that strikes me from time to time and at odd moments with a degree of epiphany that both delights and saddens. Certain mental vignettes can be quite ...

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A long stretch without a caregiver took its toll on me this morning. I was tired and sluggish and in a bad mood. We’d been waiting for the tropical storm to come our way, but the winds didn’t m...

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There’s no place like home. In life and in photography, a closer look at the familiar can often reveal truth and beauty [and] …sometimes the most revealing photographs are of the places we know ...

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“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.” Goethe There was a time starting about 15 years ago and lasting for years after that, when the Internet opened up to the sociable, but in man...

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If we could see the miracle of single flower clearly, our whole life would change. Buddha There are always flowers for those who want to see them. Henri Matisse This Spring has brought us such an...

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When I was growing up in suburban New Orleans in the 60s, my mother planted azalea bushes in our back yard garden in the early 60s. They grew to enormous size and flourished where she planted t...

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“I have always been in love with the natural world… My life has been driven by the need to be surrounded and immersed in the beauty of Nature… It has been the central focus of my existence – has ...

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It’s a strange thing getting older — older as in nearing Social Security retirement age of 66 and Medicare eligibility. You start getting a lot of things in the mail about Medicare supplemental ...

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Mom will be 92 in December. Physically, she holding her own. Two recent doctor visits — to our primary care physician and to the cardiologist this past month — came out okay. Blood work and vi...

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There is probably no more beautiful river in South Carolina than the pristine Edisto River, whose watershed runs through a long swath of central South Carolina. I’ve long been intrigued and begu...

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As I approach retirement, I find myself looking back on the past more and more often, thinking of my friends, jobs and careers with increasing emotion, even pathos. There is something quite poi...

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“Today, researchers view nostalgia – ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past’ – far more positively than their 19th-century forebears. Studies show that nostalgia can...

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“And over the course of a lifetime, we forage, root and rummage around in our stuff, because that is part of what it means to be human. We treasure…“ Dominique Browning New York Times, May 29, 20...

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Mom’s dementia is getting worse, and she is more frail than ever. I constantly worry about her falling even though someone always holds onto her when she goes anywhere in the house. Her short-t...

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March 4, 2015 I keep telling myself I need to write in this journal more often, but the subject is painful to explore and hard to recall, ironically enough, because there’s a steady drumbeat of i...

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Somehow over the years, despite all my moves and jarring dislocations, I’ve managed to hold onto a number of boxes of precious memorabilia, going back to the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. These include l...

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I love murals on buildings in towns and cities and really enjoy photographing them. Charleston has not had many, if any, of these most striking examples of street art. But lately, they seem to b...

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Quite a number of years ago, in February 1999 to be exact, I wrote an entry about “home” in my first online journal. I had not yet joined Open Diary, but that was soon to come a few months late...

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One of the hardest things about caring for an aging parent with dementia, day in and day out, year after year, is the constant awareness and strain of coming face to face with not only my loved o...

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“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;… To Autumn by John Keats “Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We’ll smell smoke then and feel an u...

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“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art…“ “To a Skylark” By Percy Bysshe Shelley It has b...

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“We must reserve a little back-shop, all our own, entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.” Montaigne “No one will ever uphold the capacities of hi...

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One of the inevitabilities of aging, for me at least, has been a tendency in my early 60s to more often than ever revisit places, times, events and memories of schools, jobs and people I knew an...

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