August - 2018

PRAISE: a blog

All that's amazing and a little science, too.

Why My Dog Barks at Dirt

Ajax, a beagle, is the sweetest, stupidest, most stubborn dog I have ever known. He’s pretty typical of hounds, which don’t always make...

Lounging in the Country of Smiles

There was a couple strolling past that, for me, expressed the essence of the beach. They’d been for married for a long time. You could...

How to Love a Toad

Fairy tales aside, I once fell in love with a toad. I was about ten years old and at a girls’ summer camp, where whenever we weren’t...

Here Where I Visit My Son: Spencer August 15, 1990 - February 17, 2012

There is a river rushing fast, rushing so fast over the shallows, where blunt, gray stones mount to the surface, that a sound like steady...

Respite in the City of Stone

It was a day when the heat strikes you like a blow. The sun glared through thick air that seemed to slow and swirl around my body in a...

Living in the Emerald City

The definition of “emerald” is, for me, a mossy rock in the woods. I walk down the rail trail through the forest in the midday heat...

To Rise on the Magic Stairway

I’m old enough to have a vague memory of the clacking wooden escalators in Macy’s department store on Thirty-Fourth and Broadway in New...

Why write a blog called PRAISE?

A healthy and happy life is based on gratitude. Check the science. Gratitude for the simple, everyday awesome things in life contributes to physical health as well as mental health. Depression causes physical pain as much as pain causes depression. Save your own heart! Steep your life in the language of praise.