Letters from Rona / Sort by date

I fled Middlebury College after one miserable year, convinced that I would never belong. I vowed to put the place behind me, like an ex-husband cut from a photo. I found another school in another country, where I made a life that suits me like my favourite jeans. But decades after I left Middlebury, I've realized it wasn't so bad after all. I see possibilities I couldn't--or wouldn't--see in my headstrong teens. [more]

Among the best perks of editing Chatelaine was being able to take my culinary dilemmas to a maven who knows home cooking the way Alain Ducasse knows haute cuisine---Food Editor Monda Rosenberg, since 1977 a trusted mentor, friend and kitchen confidante to millions of Canadian women (and no small number of men). [more]

I've often wondered why no support group existed for frustrated parents of live-in adult children who expect to hang around for as long as they please---no chores, no house rules, no move-out date or action plan. A group of these parents has been gathering here at my site, learning from one another's stories. Now they've launched that much-needed support group, Enablers Anonymous. [more]

There ought to be an award for a reader so tenacious, she'll spend six weeks tracking down a copy of a book. Not a signed first edition of The Great Gatsby (dust jacket intact, every page pristine) but My Mother's Daughter by one Rona Maynard, available online in paperback for $15.19. Now, you might think online bookstores exist to sell books to people who want to buy them and have gone so far as to type their credit card number in the handy little box. O ye of too much faith! [more]

On a laden bookshelf at a country inn, I found an abandoned copy of Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. Heilbrun's suicide at 77 had outraged many of her fans, but something compelled me to reach for this book. With a big birthday coming up, I wanted to learn from Heilbrun as she'd been before she lost hope and heart. [more]

I get peevish about crowds, mud, stinky toilets and bad food, so I've never regretted missing out on the Woodstock festival. While half a million celebrants were camping out on Yasgur's farm and getting their souls free, I was in staid Toronto, where I'd spent the summer cleaning houses inhabited by student riff-raff like me. Come to think of it, I got the stinky toilets. But I knew I'd missed something momentous. [more]

My home city, Toronto, prides itself on gastonomic flair. But where are the inventive omelets? The tantalizing updates on corned beef hash? The tofu scrambles so tasty, you don't miss eggs? I live downtown and I've come up dry. In Burlington, Vermont, it's a vastly more flavourful story. [more]

When I was a teenage misfit in a small New Hampshire town with no purveyors of guitars, French magazines or rawhide sandals like the ones worn by Biblical shepherds, I would save my allowance for escapes to the centre of all things hip and freewheeling. With my soul mate Anne, I would ride the dawn bus to Boston and jump on the subway for Harvard Square. [more]

If I must spend upwards of an hour in a doctor's waiting room, I'm wise to bring a book. The other day I sat down there with Marilynne Robinson's Home, a dense, meditative novel about guilt and forgiveness, shame and hope, the ache of absence and the unfulfilled promise of return in a family where too much has gone unsaid for too long. [more]

Our son was still in day care the first time we drove to New Hampshire, my home state, for a summer vacation on the cheap. Like every day care, Ben's kept a hamster. Like every preschooler, Ben had a vague grasp of language: he heard what made sense to him, and this didn't always coincide with what we actually said. He thought we were bound for New Hamster, and New Hamster it has been ever since to my husband and me. [more]

Our grandson, at 12, is much amused to learn how my husband spends untold hours of time. Genealogy! Now there's a word to get a 12-year-old rolling his eyes. Think about it: why would anyone choose to study...genies? Hasn't Grandpa heard of Harry Potter? Kidding aside, I too have been perplexed by this midlife passion of my husband's. [more]

If I am ever rushed on a gurney to Emerg, with a tube up my nose and a throng of doctors yelling orders in my wake, I want the first face I see to be Nurse Jackie's. Nothing stands between TV's stalwart nurse and her patient---not meddlesome relatives, not by-the-book hospital brass, not MDs determined to be heroes no matter what the cost. And certainly not her own limits. [more]