A few months ago, a malicious third party made a comment about my mother, whom she had never actually known, that created distance between my mother and me. It was a puzzling, obscuring distance my mother had never occupied during her lifetime.

As a little girl, one of my vivid memories of being caught in the wrong belongs to the gift a camp counselor once gave me. This gift-giving happened the last day of the season of the Day Camp that sometimes held sway over part of the summer at Hilltop.

From precognitive dreams, where the future is recognizably predicted before it happens, we can infer that time is other than what ordinarily we think it is. 

Except for the dentistry, this old world seems to be going from bad to worse. It’s been downhill for decades. Neighborhoods going to hell. Small businesses and specialty shops closing. Anti-Semitism at a toxic high. Quaint, historic towns and country spaces overtaken by gas stations and fast food joints. Whole domains of inherited culture dropping out of memory.

Long ago, I waited in New York City for a promised letter from Paris that never came. My first love, not a good correspondent, nor a good keeper of promises, was a communist. Not a party member, but an intellectually ardent sympathizer.

What is standing, for a woman, and what is to be done about it?

It’s a sign, ladies, of something we all know about: the unfairness of life. 

Having grown up in city apartments, owning a home had never been high on my list of desirables. In fact, co-inheriting one, when my parents died, felt like the hand of a heavy fate on my shoulders.

Being born and raised a Jewish girl from Manhattan’s old-rent, upper east side, the last thing I’m expected to like is country gospel. Or so I’m often told.

The Ariadne’s Thread that connects one episode of one’s life to the next is provided by our women friends – the ones to whom our stories can be told. 

I am suffering from burnout. Until the other day, I hadn’t noticed it as a specific complaint.