Letters from Rona / Sort by date

"I'm so over your desk," my son said with a faintly dismissive look at the desk where I'm sitting right now. And a fine desk it is: keyboard tray, two drawers, made right here in Canada, not in some Third World sweatshop. He had planned to buy one just like it for the house he and my daughter-in-law have bought. Now he covets a designer desk with neither keyboard tray nor drawers. Oh, well. These days no self-respecting husband takes decor direction from his mother---or his wife, for that matter. There's something about owning a marital home that transforms the modern male from a schlepper with a TV and a plywood futon to a furniture maven whose domestic visions feature Barcelona chairs and dish racks that double as countertop sculptures [more]

While scanning a dark movie theatre in search of my husband's face, I spotted the bright chrome glint of the cane that he was waving in my direction like a banner. A cane, we have lately discovered, has uses undreamed-of by those who have no call for one. It can flick light switches, press elevator buttons and open California shutters. In saucy hands it can tickle a spouse's bum. [more]

My mother taught me to love the stories at the heart of every life. Now that she's no longer around to meet me for a Mother's Day lunch, her stand-in is the stories we lived together. It's partly in tribute to her that I've created a forum on this website, the mother/daughter gallery, where readers can post defining memories of the women who formed them and the girls they are guiding into adulthood. If you haven't toured the gallery, what better time than Mother's Day? Read on for a preview of the preview of the colourful, unforgettable and sometimes maddeningly complicated characters you'll meet. But don't stop there. You too have a mother/daughter story, and this is the place to share it. [more]

Do you ever visit open houses just to peer into the private lives of your fellow humans? Me too. That's how I stepped into the graciously proportioned house where Diane Keaton briefly lived with Al Pacino, just around the corner from the modest brick semi where my family was living at the time. [more]

We were dressing for a party while a summer storm drenched the city. Trees swayed and creaked in the wind; rain lashed the bedroom windows. It pelted down with such noisy, wall-beating force, I could have sworn someone was draining a bathtub on the third floor, where no tub had ever existed. "What a stinker!" I said to my husband as I clipped my favourite earrings into place. "Couldn't you swear you were standing in the middle of that rain?" [more]

Until this morning I didn't know anemones from amaryllis and never even heard of camas, but I have the good fortune to be in Victoria as spring gardens come into their own, and to be walking its leafy streets with my hostess and friend Maxine, who has ensured that I don't miss the last Easter lilies or the Monet intensity of massed bluebells seen from afar. We've mostly been talking about serious things: the eternal complications of family, the vulnerability of loved ones we once trusted would always be part of our world. One minute we're pondering about some devastating illness or other. The next minute it's "Look at those rhodos!" [more]

Assignment: delve into a $12 million sex discrimination case for Toronto Life magazine. Writer: young woman with no agenda or interest in gender disparity. Result: a feminist conversion and a story that says what older women with big jobs have been saying for years over a second glass of wine. However the case unfolds, that's news. [more]

No matter what field you're in or how accomplished you are, there will be times when you find yourself perplexed by a challenge you've never faced before. So you turn to a trustworthy pro with the contacts or the know-how to point you in the right direction. A person like my friend Leslie, a busy self-employed consultant who gets a buzz from sharing what she's learned. [more]

"I love the word 'affair'," said a friend who's had many more illicit escapades than I will ever know. She had just made her way, with a walker and great deliberation, to the favourite armchair where she sat draped in white terrycloth. She looked through me as if to the scene of some long-ago tryst. Then she looked straight at me with a smile that was equal parts mischief and maternal concern. "You should have an affair," she announced. [more]

I dismissed Earth Hour as an empty symbolic gesture. Why sit for an hour in the dark when the real challenge is breaking wasteful habits like running the washer for a single pair of jeans? I figured I would break those habits---someday. Then my home lost power for more than 15 hours. And I learned how emotionally dependent I've become on electricity at my command. [more]

When I was a child, my memory was like a kid's closet---I could pretty much eyeball the works. Now it's a crazy jumble of milestones that no one else alive remembers (the time, to the minute, of my sister's birth in 1953) and stuff you'd think no reasonable person could remember (jingles for defunct cleaning products). [more]

Sometime in her 50s my mother happened on a dusty box of Tampax that she'd tucked under the bathroom sink God knows when and thought to herself with no small degree of puzzlement, "Hmm, it's been eons since I had any call for one of those." If there's a gene for a menopause from heaven, the kind that tiptoes in unnoticed, she didn't pass it on to me. Yet in midlife I too lost a part of my psychic self while thinking of more important things. I used to be one of those people who are always fretting over some imagined illness or other. I figured I was stuck with the hypochondria habit that had dogged my steps like a persistent panhandler with a fake hard-luck story. Then one day I turned around and it had vanished. [more]