One more week and the ride will be over. I can feel it slowing down, hear the music easing to a halt. I'm trying hard not to anticipate the end, to savor the moment and luxuriate in now. But tomorrow is in the shadows, in the shrinking days, in the orange-red of the mountain ash, in the still, August nights, and in my children who are so eager for the ride to end…

The story ran in The Patriot Ledger last Monday and it's been on my mind since. I thought about it when I went to visit my cousin who has three young children but works more than 30 hours a week, nights and weekends, because she has to if she's to make ends meet. She doesn't see her husband much because he's working 12-hour days. But that's the way it is. She doesn't complain. She doesn't have time to…

The writing is tacky. There are too many "My darlings," and exclamation marks and phrases like "there were no longer words or thoughts, only a union beyond mind, beyond time, beyond the world." But that's not what's wrong with "Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind…”

The path is familiar. I have been walking it for nine summers now. I know where the roots of trees protrude, where rocks jut, where poison ivy hides, where blueberries and raspberries nestle, where puddles form when it rains, where tiny yellow birds perch, where the brush is so thick that the path seems to disappear, where the broadest view of the Atlantic is…