When life gets oppressive and the TV news depressing, I’ve found a perfect escape. No matter the weather, this place is pastoral. Birds...

I can’t imagine life without color. I live where winter is long and the world appears as if painted with a neutral, uninspired palette....

To share your talents is advice that makes a lot of sense. Whatever skills you have can help enrich other’s lives. Recently, eight of my...

As a teenager, Easter was a metamorphosis. Almost overnight, winter had passed and the sapling would sprout tender leaves. I knew that...

My mom Olive asked her older sister Hazel this question. I was little and wondered what the heck mom needed to pray about? Was something...

While spring fever isn't an actual medical malady, it is real enough to anyone who has ever been stricken with it. It comes as winter...

Our pets are family members. If only they could talk. Here is what a sweet dog Abby had to say to her mom, Melissa Miinte Stewart. Hi...

Creativity is not merely an attribute of philosophers, scientists, or bearded sages. According to writer Maya Angelo, “We are all born...

Winter is a time to hunker down and seek comfort. Where I live three months of glacial temperatures (December, January, and February)...

As if entering seventh grade wasn’t shocking enough getting an invitation to an affair called a Rush Tea indoctrinated me into a world as...

The year-end holidays can take a toll. With so much to accomplish, I find myself speeding through days and at night sinking into sleep,...

Artists are told that the more you create art the easier it is to find subjects to paint. It took a year of being quarantined for me to...

Humans unlike many species have no protective exoskeleton so, from the earliest time, due to practicality (and modesty) we garbed...

One definition of angel is God’s thoughts passing to man. What a concept! At college, in a required philosophy course, I floundered from...

On November 21, 1963, rooms at a hotel in Fort Worth were being readied for the visit of President John Kennedy and First Lady...

My habit is to have a Timbit at Halloween or occasionally a few bites of an old-fashioned plain fry cake but, that wasn’t always the...

Today my husband lugged two big boxes of art history books down the stairs and loaded them into the car to give away. The weighty and...

When I began teaching art decades ago, coloring books were forbidden as stifling creativity. Fast forward to find that times have...

Today I learned of the death of a childhood friend, Sandy Lang. Her dad was a meat cutter at Loblaws at Sheridan Plaza and, at ten, I had...

As I put freshly washed dishes in the drainer a voice whispers: “They’re water sweet.” My friend from childhood had a grandmother who...