Hallelujah! The new CDC guidelines suggest that fully vaccinated people can, after two weeks, have dinner with a few other fully vaccinated people—without wearing masks. A Facebook friend calls it Liberation Day. We’ve got a date for one child to visit, I’m already contemplating small dinner parties, and I can’t wait. It’s been a long, … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
If you could live your life over again, would you change anything? Would you make any decisions differently? And if you’d chosen those other paths, would your life have been happier? Or more successful? Or more fulfilled? I’ve been thinking about these questions because I just finished reading Matt Haig’s Midnight Library. In the novel, … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
It’s all anyone can think about. On walks or on email chats, we try to talk about other things, but the conversation inevitably drifts back to vaccination appointments: the When, the Where, and the How. In Massachusetts last Thursday, the over-65 crowd was suddenly allowed to sign up. So guess what? With a million new … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
Yes, I do know how lucky I am (husband, house, reasonable and reliable income). Some days the ordinary round pleases me, some days I know intellectually that I’m grateful, and some days I actually feel my gratitude. But I’m a restless person, too. Novelty, change, and travel – they sharpen my mind, make me feel … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
The opening lines of Dante’s Comedy are so direct, so chilling. In the middle of the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the straight road was lost. We’re right beside Dante as he becomes aware of the deep ravine and ominous forest, as hope flares with a … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
February in New England is cold. One winter many years ago, when I lived halfway up Vermont and had to get to the office early in the morning, the outdoor temperature gauge read thirty below zero. At first, I suspected the gauge was broken. Because sleet had iced up the lock, it took some time … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
We live in a golden age of memoir. While we often like our fiction, in this postmodern age, to explore the outer boundaries of the imagination (including alternative histories and magical-realist fables), we also crave the weight and heft of real life. Well-written memoirs fill that spot perfectly. So it’s no accident that two of … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
The documentary film Some Kind of Heaven paints a provocative portrait of post-retirement life in The Villages, an enormous complex in central Florida. My friend Maddy—author, journalist, professor emerita, and good buddy—saw it last February at an early screening, at the Miami Film Festival. When the film became widely available on streaming services last week, … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
A year or so ago, a friend pulled me aside and whispered urgently that everything was “going south.” She meant everything in her body, and I confessed that mine was doing the same. (Alas.) But I prefer to contemplate the prospect of literally going south, to Florida, Arizona, or Mexico. Or west, for some–to Hawaii. … Read More
by Nancy Coiner
Last year left us jittery and suspicious. So when my husband saw the New Year’s cards I’d bought—with Rilke’s “And now let us welcome the new year, full of thing that have never been” on the front—he pointed at the final words and said, “Really? ‘Things that have never been’? How about ‘things we had … Read More
by Nancy Coiner