To say that I don’t have a green thumb is a gross understatement. Two years ago, I tried again. I bought three robust Bradley tomato plants (the kind my grandfather always grew with great success). Four months of growth produced plants over five feet tall…but only 1 tomato. One. And that one was carried off by a…
Let me start by saying that this post is, in large part, a repost from 2020. I have updated it and reposted it because, as I contemplated my response to the question “what am I trying to say?”, I concluded that Home is definitely a part of that. So, here goes. CHOOSING HOME I was near the end of a…
A not so unusual exchange for me: “Skip Burke. Is that your legal name?” Well, no, it’s William M. Burke. “You’re in your seventies and you’re still called Skip?” Yes sir, I probably wouldn’t respond to anything else. Actually, Skip doesn’t seem overly childish to me. After all, Skip was a real…
247 steps from the front door of our rental cottage to the Marginal Way…the path that winds along the coastline from Perkins Cove into Ogunquit. Just finished three days of dawn walks to rocks there; rocks that make exceptional seating for coffee and morning devotionals. The sunrises were pretty, but the lack of clouds rendered the colors less than…
Phone calls that you receive at 4:15 am are never good ones. So when I groggily grabbed my phone on July 14th, 2025, and saw that the caller was Charter Senior Living, I knew the conversation would be about my mom and would not be pleasant. I wasn’t totally surprised to hear that my mother, Margaret Burke, was…