Recently, I read a story about a young woman in rural Nepal who burned to death because she was having her period.

Partabi Bogati was following the ancient Hindu practice of chhaupadi (from a word that means “impurity”), which sees menstruating women as bearers of disease, disaster and bad luck; they are barred from handling food, using public water sources, or sleeping under the same roof as their families. Bogati was spending the night in one of the small mud or wooden huts, some no bigger than a closet or a foxhole. She died trying to stay warm.

I can’t stop looking at the New York Times special feature, “Redefining Representation: The Women of the 116th Congress.”

This gallery of 130 — of the 131 — female senators and representatives is a celebration of racial, ethnic, religious and geographical diversity. It’s full of firsts: first Native American women (plural!), first Muslim women (plural!), first bi-sexual atheist, first black congresswomen from Massachusetts and Connecticut.

This is what American women look like.

This is also what American women dress like. Not when you’re making a midnight run for diapers or going to a wedding. More like when you’re off to a birthday dinner at a tablecloth restaurant, when you glance in the mirror on the way out the door and smile.

I am outside and the app on my phone tells me it’s only 20 degrees. I haven’t had any coffee yet and I forgot one of my gloves, or maybe it’s lost; I lose a lot of gloves.

The commuters sprint by, hoping to make it to the streetcar before it pulls away, lest they be stuck like me, standing with my shoulders hiked up to my ears, exhaling steam, and shivering.

I am outside in the cold most winter mornings, un-caffeinated and losing the feeling in my toes, because I have a dog.

Reading The New Yorkeris a weekly pleasure – not just the cartoons, though they are reliably wonderful. A few weeks ago, (12/17/18) I came across an article about artificial facial recognition, “Here’s Looking at You” by staff writer David Owens. It begins in an Irish cow barn where cameras record the actions of Bossy and Bessie in the service of increasing milk production. This technology may someday enable physicians to make diagnoses before symptoms become apparent; police departments are already using it and other government agencies and it has – as its inventors warn — potentially Orwellian applications.

Watching the TV coverage of the slow-rolling horror in Pittsburgh, I thought:

I’m glad my mother is not alive to see this.

My mother was 92 when she died, a year ago. She was 15 when the Nazis marched into Paris. Her brother was turned in by a neighbor and died in Auschwitz and she barely escaped a transport to the same concentration camp.

The week before the vote, I said good morning to my neighbor, who answered, “He’s not going to be confirmed is he?

I said, “Yes, he is.”

She looked horrified.

I was equally horrified, but I didn’t doubt the outcome. The old bulls (as Dan Rather called the old white men who defend power and money) are in control, as they have been since the beginning of recorded time. They were not going to let one of their own go down. So after a stormy but brief pause, Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in to sit on the highest court in the land, now a seesaw, heavily weighted to the right.

The sidewalk in my Brookline neighborhood is a free-for-all – literally. The students are coming and more to the point, the students are going and leaving behind mountains of stuff: cat-shredded couches, chairs missing legs or seats, and a million giant garbage bags stuffed with the flotsam of student life: clothes, pillows, half empty jars of spices, posters, and … well, better not to speculate about the rest.

 September 1 is called “Allston Christmas” in honor of this smelly phenomenon, but that’s a misnomer and a gross understatement; it happens all over greater Boston and goes on for a solid two weeks.

After reading The New York Times rave about The Taming of the Shrew at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, I got cranky. And I mean cranky like a five-year-old in the supermarket who wants Sugar Smacks  (which are now called “Honey” Smacks, for obvious reasons.)

But I can’t go to Garrison in upstate New York to see the play because, well, life.

Maybe I should stop calling it a crush.

Last spring, I signed up for the Shakespeare Workout (an all-level, no-prior-experience-necessary acting class offered by Actor’s Shakespeare Project in Boston.) Since then, I’ve been to as many live performances of as many Shakespeare plays as I could get to, watched several more on video, lurked at rehearsals, insinuated myself into the lives of a few talented actors, and written about some of my adventures in Shakespeare-land.

In 1958, my parents sent me to day camp at the Jewish Community Center in Newark, New Jersey. All I remember about those two weeks is swimming in a big blue pool and the elaborate camp-wide celebration for the Fourth of July.

Risers were set up in the gym for the singing of patriotic songs. Campers made red, white and blue decorations for an indoor parade and pageant, and I got to be the Statue of Liberty, complete with paper crown, toga, book, torch and a speaking part: reciting the poem displayed on the statue’s pedestal. There was also a short introduction of the author, which began, “Emma Lazarus, an American Jewess …”