All too soon, the produce aisles will be full of apples and pears, and while they will get me through the winter – for a few more weeks, I am bingeing on summer fruit – diverse, juicy, and sweet. Fruit is also the most provocative food group. The apple was alluring enough to have caused…

Iris Apfel — a fashion icon like none other — died on March 1 at the age of 102. The obituaries and testimonials were laudatory, affectionate and larded with more breathless adjectives than raisins in a fruitcake.I never met the woman in the flesh, but I did spend a couple of hours in 2009 with a selection from the contents of her amazing closet. And it changed the way I thought about my own closet

Toby was my fourth dog. He was my COVID dog, my first shelter dog, first mutt. He was a ridiculously picky eater. He was my most photogenic dog. Toby had Milk Dud eyes, perky ears and a perfectly proportioned snoot (long but nothing like a snout). Once, he even stopped traffic — a big guy driving a construction…

I am not Boston-born. I didn’t come for college and stay here, like many people I know. I chose this New England life 48 years ago and never budged. Staying put is a big change from my family’s history going back at least three generations. My great-grandparents on both sides were born in Poland; their children, my…

In April, I promised myself that I would savor the summer day by day, with the mantra: “Be here now.” But now that September is upon us, the fall field crickets (gryllus pennsyslvanicus) are calling time and, as usual, they’ve triggered the onset of my annual autumnal melancholy. Winter is coming. Woe is me. On…

SNOWMAGGEDON!! January 31, 2022 It got very quiet that night. Kind of like Christmas Eve, if a little less twinkly. The supermarket parking lots were empty. It was so still that I could hear the click and buzz of streetlights going red to green. Every passing car was an event. It was the overture to…

Once upon a time, in March 2020, I taped a paper mask to the inside of my front door as a public health and safety reminder. But because I tend to leave the house without at least one of the essentials (keys, cell phone, leash, poop bags for Toby, the Terrier mix), I wrote “Mask?”…

I wrote my first mass-shooting column 22 years ago, after two students at Columbine High School murdered 13 of their classmates and then turned the guns on themselves. That happened in Littleton, Colorado, a few miles from where I grew up. I addressed that piece to reassure my daughter, who was then in middle school…