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I once knew two women whose husbands were brothers and, on the first weekend of each month, the two families and the husbands’ parents would take turns working at one of the young couples’ homes or that of the parents. Young cousins played while older cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents either worked on a project or helped cook meals for everyone. I easily imagined one day doing the same…

My friend Jen has always been restless. We met more than 25 years ago at Ohio State University. After graduation, she worked for a year on a farm in Kansas cultivating native prairie plants. Then she joined the Peace Corps and worked for two years with farmers in Honduras. She met Milan after returning from the Peace Corps. They moved to the East, got married, changed their last names to…

Being the landlord of a single rental property is largely a passive source of income–except when tenants turn over. When that happened to Dreisbach House early last month, I spent a week cleaning it. That same week, my wallet was stolen, one of my dogs got sick all over the house I live in and the air conditioning did not work when I turned it on for the first time this season. But, to quote…

On the fifth daythe scientists who studied the riverswere forbidden to speakor to study the rivers.The scientists who studied the airwere told not to speak of the air,and the ones who worked with farmerswere silenced... Four days after Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, all information on climate change was removed from the White House website and all scientists who worked for the…

There’s a saying in the restaurant business that the food brings people in the first time, but it’s the service that brings them back and makes them regulars. The summer of 2000, my then-husband’s employer hired a man whose wife I’d worked with in Columbus years earlier. We lived in Cleveland at the time and drove to the Montrose Macaroni Grill at the couple’s invitation. I held my third child,…

The need to garden is surely encoded in my DNA; my family tree is filled with long lines of farmers. No merchants, tradespeople, masons: just generation after generation of ancestors who, until quite recently, worked the land. My mother’s uncles both farmed in LaPorte, Indiana, where they were raised with my grandma and another sister on their parents’ farm. Mormon pioneers on my dad’s side…

“Assume That I Can, So Maybe I Will,” released in 2024, is one of my favorite World Down Syndrome Day video shorts. Down syndrome occurs when a person has three copies of the 21st chromosome, which is why World Down Syndrome Day is on 3/21. Every March 21, events that celebrate people with Down syndrome (DS) take place worldwide. Because my daughter, Lyra, a 13-year-old sixth grader, has DS,…

A 2023 Harvest for Hunger ad featuring a photo of a young girl revealed more about those who created the ad than it did about people who are food insecure. In a column, I imagined how the advertising company decided to portray her and wrote: “The result is a hackneyed stereotype of the poor — a child whose hair is messy, a stand-in for dirty, which is just a short walk to laziness. Not far behind…

If you had 80 or 90 years on this planet, how many lives do you think you might positively impact? A dozen? Twenty? Those in helping professions may benefit large numbers of people, but what about the rest of us? Let me tell you about a girl who who managed to touch the lives of almost everyone in Copley in fewer than 12 years. When Lorelei Green was born to her parents, Kate and Bryan, in…

Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Both were killed by ICE agents while peacefully protesting in Minneapolis this month. Anything can become normalized, including changes in people, health and relationships. And adapting to change is generally a desirable goal. Changes can also occur, and normalize, with governments, borders, peace and war. When I was born, America and the USSR were in a lengthy Cold…

Portraits of Claire Cressler and his wife, Gloria, atop Cressler’s sketches and pen-and-ink drawings of Summit Co. buildings for Great Northern Savings and Loan’s annual calendars. I was visiting my next door neighbor, Claire Cressler, on his porch one summer afternoon when Jill, our neighbor from across the street, joined us. Claire described how he worked most evenings in the third-floor…

“When I was young, I had the body of a Greek god,” my foster father told me. “Now I just have the body of an old Greek,” which he was. I lived with John and his wife, Ruth, in their double-wide trailer on several acres outside of Boyne City, Michigan, when I was 15. Before retiring to northern Michigan, John had been a fire marshal near Detroit. “When we lived downstate, I taught an NRA program…

Leif, Max, Lyra and Holly at Akron’s Oct. 18 No Kings Day protest. No sooner had I finished my last column extolling the beauty of autumn in our part of the world, when the weather shifted. Highs went from upper 60s to low 50s, still pleasant but indicating the waning days until winter arrives. For those with yards and gardens, it’s time to put away patio furniture, bring in plants that will…