After my husband, Mike, passed away, simple, everyday occurrences that at one time were easily taken care of caused me to feel insecure, frightened and sad. I sometimes felt a great deal of anger. There were moments when I wanted to go for a walk or a drive, and keep going and never look back. […]

It was the late spring of 1975 and I was 19 years old, wearing pink hot pants and a halter top. I was a member of a USO tour in Southeast Asia. Ten of us from the University of Maine at Farmington were in Korea. Transport between military bases was by helicopter. One day, we […]

Close calls can teach you a lot of lessons about life. It was a cold winter morning in 2011, and I was home from college for winter break in Naples. A nor’easter had just swept through the night before and left several feet of snow in its wake. I did a visual check of the […]

I wasn’t even a week into freshman year when I heard the saying “You’ll never know if those are gunshots or fireworks.” Savannah College of Art and Design boasted an extravagant campus in a charming city. Robberies weren’t mentioned in our orientation packet, and neither were the four years of sirens we’d hear on a […]

A year out of college, I was finding it impossible to land a job in the journalistic profession for which I’d spent four years preparing. There were two newspapers in Salt Lake City, where I was living at the time, and neither the Tribune nor the Deseret News was interested in my unproven reportorial prowess. […]

My husband, Alan, walks through the Maine woods regularly with an ease and confidence I cannot share. He has been wandering through vast woodlands since he was 5, so I was not surprised when he saw the old fire tower off in the distance, researched the trail map and decided to hike to it. We […]

I am not by nature a risk-taker. In general I prefer to play it safe, at least in real life. But even the most cautious people can have their moments of insanity, especially in their teen years. One summer day I visited Fort Williams with my family. I had spent several of my formative years […]