Finding that the garden is a rabbits' salad bar

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Finding that the garden is a rabbits' salad bar

They ate my Jack and the Beanstalk tree. From stem to leafy stem they felled it, devoured it, and made it disappear. Rabbits, I fumed. Bandits and thieves. And other names I cannot repeat. It wasn't, for the record, a real Jack and the Beanstalk tree. It didn't grow from magic beans overnight and disappear above the clouds into a land of giants. It wasn't even a tree, just a leggy, flowering plant. But it was taller than I am by at least a foot, and to the 3- and 4-year-olds who called it their Jack and the Beanstalk tree, it seemed to reach the sky…

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Victories come, sweet and simple

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`The victories, when they come, will be sweet," someone, many someones, told us after my granddaughter Lucy was born.

But we didn't believe in victories then or that life would ever be sweet again. We were stunned and scared and grieving the child Lucy wasn't. The words "Down syndrome" had rocked our world.

We should have listened to the people in the trenches, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, people who knew and loved someone with a disability who kept telling us: She will be fine. You will be fine. You will be better than fine. Wait. You'll see. We've seen.

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A land of fairy tales and memories

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We wore dresses - my grandmother, my mother, and I. My grandmother's was frilly and swirled when she walked. My mother's was light brown, a color she seldom wore but wore well. And mine was turquoise with puff sleeves, a cinched waist, and a white mock-apron top, which I thought was very Heidi-like.

I was into Heidi back then.

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