Rosemary is the herb of remembrance, and it isn’t just Shakespeare who says so. Its powerful aroma inspired ancient Greek students to weave garlands of it through their hair to help them remember their lessons. Medieval people thought that rosemary’s pungent fragrance could fumigate the air and keep them safe from the plague. Even now, cognitive aromatherapy believes that inhaling rosemary’s bracing scent provides a wake-up jolt to the brain, increasing alertness and mental function.

These days, I can’t testify to how that works. I lost my sense of smell to a virus a little over a year ago, and it’s taking its good old time coming back.

The complete loss of smell is called anosmia. Experiencing that proved just how much I’d taken my sense of smell for granted. I missed sniffing (most) ambient aromas in the air and learned to hate recipes that said things like “Sauté garlic over low heat until fragrant.” Despite a book-knowledge understanding that smell and taste were besties, I never expected that a lack of smell would completely hijack my sense of taste. But, for a while, I tasted nothing. (I know this for a fact, because I kept trying.)

Soon, anosmia shifted into parosmia, which is the distortion of smell. While parosmia is considered a sign that the nose and brain are trying to reconnect, it also brings its own “delights.” Neurons in the nose mis-wire, making once-pleasant aromas smell like garbage or chemicals. Coffee, my life source, smelled putrid. The perfume I’d worn for decades became intolerable. Sometimes, I caught unpleasant whiffs even when there wasn’t anything in the air to smell. Parosmia also affects taste. For me, everything tasted the way Ti-D-Bol smells…even chocolate, which seemed particularly cruel.

Enter Olfactory Rehab, currently the only solution medicine has to help a person regain their sense of smell. Olfactory Rehab (that’s “smell training” to most of us) involves sniffing potent essential oils to help the brain remember how to smell. My smell-training kit uses lemon (fruity), clove (spicy), eucalyptus (aromatic), and rose (flowering), a broad spectrum of scents representing different olfactory receptors in the nose. The idea is to sniff these scents twice a day to help stimulate the brain’s smell-memory. Recording how each scent smells each time tracks your progress.

This was never fated to work for me. I’m too skeptical, and I always have way too many questions. What if my memory of the smell is wrong and I retrain my brain incorrectly? If retraining the brain is all about remembering scents, why wouldn’t casually sniffing the real-life scents in my life – like coffee and herbs – accomplish the same results? Worse … what if smell training is like yoga for me, and I just can’t take it seriously enough?

I don’t know if smell training works, because I never used it correctly. (It turns out it was like yoga, and I couldn’t stop laughing at the vision of myself doing it.)

Time seems to be on my side. Coffee still doesn’t smell quite like I remember, but the aroma that greets me in the morning is pleasant enough, and the taste grows more familiar every day. Chocolate is improving. I’m still surprised by what I can and can’t smell or taste correctly. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. I don’t know why some kinds of apples taste fine and other kinds taste like soap. And why can’t I smell something as pungent as a fire in a firepit yet totally pick up the scent of my favorite frankincense incense?

Rosemary still doesn’t smell like the heady scent I remember. It’s tinny and medicinal, more annoying than invigorating. But we’re moving along.

Someday, I may even smell cookies baking again.

Examples of recent memory-visits include vivid scenes from an operetta I did in sixth grade (including reliving my solos), embarrassment over mean moments from decades ago (involving people I haven’t seen since), walking through a long-shuttered hardware store I rarely shopped but now suddenly miss. These events don’t seem relevant to the life I live now.

It’s fair to say that I overthink just about everything, and not always in the most positive light. This explains my initial knee-jerk explanations for why these small moments in time keep popping up now:

I’m gonna die! Well, yes. You are. We all are. But most likely not tomorrow.

It’s the dementia coming for me! Possibly, but everything else seems copacetic for now, so why go there?

There’s something I need to fix before I leave this planet! Safe bet. There’s always something in my life I could have done better, and hindsight is really good at pointing out how badly I mishandled a particular situation. So, maybe this is a chance to review and repair. But also maybe there’s more to it than just making me feel bad.

One of the earliest documentations of that life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing comes from Francis Beaufort, a British naval officer who nearly drowned in 1790. He wrote that in the moments before death, every event from his life sped rapidly across his mind. Later stories from other near-death survivors supported his account.

Finally, a neurological study published in 2023 added a scientific element to this phenomenon. In this study, researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed EEG and ECG readings of terminal patients who had been taken off life support. When these patients transitioned into cardiac arrest, two of the four exhibited a surge in gamma wave activity at the back of the brain, a region traditionally associated with processing memory. Something was happening.

Science is also catching up with explanations for the cavalcade of memories that surface unbidden in our minds. As we grow older, our brains juggle fewer professional demands and family distractions. With less mental clutter, memory networks deep in our brains can more easily access our consciousness, giving us a chance to recall previously buried events in our lives.

Lives deserve examination. My general belief is that if an image keeps showing up, it wants to tell me something. It’s offering an opportunity to examine events a little more closely, to discover if there are any parts in them that require healing. (I’d certainly rather determine that now than during that last, very final life-review.) But there may be nothing wrong with just enjoying this personal version of This Is Your Life. I built it, after all. There are parts I’m proud of. Maybe it’s okay to occasionally sit back and remember without angst.

I love watching background characters, those unknown actors who have been hired to enhance a scene. They do it without uttering a word. Most of them spend more time hanging around on the sidelines than they do in front of a camera. They won’t know if their work survived final cuts until they see the released film at a theater or at home. But there they are, gamely giving it their best, populating a scene with all they’ve got. Some do it so naturally that they just fit in. Some over-emote, hooking me for all the wrong reasons. Some don’t quite fit; maybe they belong in a different movie. But almost all extras arrive on set knowing who their self-created character is and how that person ended up at that particular location. Often, they’ve given their characters backstories. If I watch closely enough (and don’t blink), I can sometimes catch glimmers of what that story is.

I like this. Just because the camera is focused on those main characters moving the narrative forward doesn’t mean they’re the only ones with a story to tell. Everyone has one. Every character has a reason to be where they are at that particular time, doing whatever they’re doing. Or at least, they should.

With my interest in background characters, it’s not too surprising that my current manuscript has been hijacked by a character originally brought in to support my protagonist’s plotline. This character’s role in the story didn’t exist when I first mapped everything out. Her chapters don’t even take place in the same era. But there was no denying that the story as written wasn’t quite landing, and this character was insistent that she could help me out. So, I gave her a chance.

I didn’t expect her to take over.

I should have seen it coming. Gradually, I found myself more interested in the new sections of my manuscript, less drawn to what I’d originally assumed was the plot. My bossy new character had a lot to say. Sometimes, she made me laugh out loud. I was connecting with her on a far different level than was happening with my protags. With them, I was an outsider telling their story. But New Girl invited me in, and I couldn’t wait to see where she planned to take us. Finally, I realized that I’d been focusing on the wrong plotline all along.

Can you say “total rewrite”? But that’s okay. The ability of a character to show me something unexpected rounds out the story. It adds dimensions I didn’t see before.

Film extras are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Generative AI tools can easily duplicate people performing background actions. Digital face and body scans reproduce realistic crowd images. This saves a chunk of production costs, because there’s no need to hire a bevy of live actors to populate a scene. But for me, a scene loses something when you take human motivation and unpredictability out of the background. I like the possibility that an extra might go rogue.

My characters are welcome to do that whenever they want.

Okay, then. The truth: internet reviews and ratings are a major part of the “word of mouth” book buzz readers once found via publication reviews and libraries. They give bookstores, editors, and potential readers an idea of how well a book is being received by the public, often influencing sales and promotion attempts.

You’ve just finished reading a novel. (For the sake of random and totally unbiased argument, let’s say it’s one of mine.) You

1. love, love, love it;

2. can’t imagine how anyone on Earth could love, love, love it;

3. think the author needs serious help.

You want to review this book online because

1. everyone should read it – it’s THAT good;

2. nobody should read it – no person’s karma can be THAT bad;

3. the author needs serious help.

There’s no doubt that customer reviews are influential. But if I had a chance to review the reviews, I’d say that some are better than others, and it has little to do with whether or not the reviewer liked the book.

Here’s my subjective list of a few approaches to avoid when writing an online review:

“This book was boring.” Details, please. Which aspect of this book didn’t interest you? Sometimes the type of book one reader finds dull is exactly the sort another reader enjoys.

“I liked the story, but I gave the book one star because it is morally offensive.” Different issues offend different readers. It’s helpful to be honest about your own sensibilities right up front: “This book made me uncomfortable because I believe that dabbling in the supernatural is blasphemous.” (Yes, that criticism has been applied to my books.) In a world where low ratings can hurt sales, please don’t give a competent novel an overall poor review on the sole basis that parts of it didn’t jibe with your personal beliefs.

“I liked this book right up until (MAJOR PLOT REVEAL THAT MAKES IT UNNECESSARY TO READ THE BOOK).” Please. I’m crying, here. Please, please don’t give away plot twists that took authors hours and hours to create, plot twists we hoped would raise the story to the next level, plot twists that … please, don’t.

“The characters in this book were written by someone with an emotional IQ of three.” Try to remember that a real person wrote this book. Don’t be mean. In a related vein, please don’t sacrifice kindness in an attempt to be funny. Okay, maybe the author DOES have an emotional IQ of three, but can you think of a more constructive way to get your point across, something less personal and more related to the story itself?

“This book was just a beach read, not worth my time.” Try to remember that the review is about the book, not how erudite the reader is. Some readers LIKE beach reads.

So, what’s a reviewer to do? Glad you asked.

In my opinion, the best – and most credible – reviews allow readers to draw their own conclusions about whether or not they might like a particular book. The reviewer does this by focusing on the book itself: did the plot keep you turning pages? Were the characters interesting? If something didn’t work for you in the story, why didn’t it? Would this novel maybe appeal to a certain kind of reader? Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

It’s interesting to note that positive reviews can come with their own pitfalls. There are readers who doubt the validity of every five-star review, suspecting that they’ve been written by relatives of the author, friends, or scam pay-for-positive-reviews services (oh, yes there are). Those readers prefer to choose their books based on information gleaned from bad reviews, figuring that at least those comments are honest. And, as mentioned earlier, one person’s poison can be another’s feast.

P.S. This essay is a revision of one I wrote many years ago, before my novel Newport was published…and before it received a one-star review because Kindle didn’t download properly. (It made me laugh, but in a dark, desperate sort of way.)

So, remember: however you feel about that book you plan to review, the power is yours …wield it wisely!

And keep reading!

Letting go of someone you love while assuring them that all will be well feels like an impossible contradiction. It’s almost too much to ask us to do. But nobody gets out of here alive. Helping to ease a soul from this world into the next is a profound event, especially when that soul is the one that brought you here in the first place.

For a while, I couldn’t picture my mom beyond that last hospital bed. Her death came at the end of a long decline, so maybe it’s no surprise that more vital recollections of her got stashed away deep in my consciousness. I needed to access a different set of emotions to help her, and that required focusing on the situation at hand rather than dwelling on memories of stronger days. Still, it seemed unfair that even after Mom passed, the happier, more vital versions of her self remained just beyond my reach. Eventually, with time, they began to re-emerge. They returned in no particular order, drifting from era to era as stories from her childhood in the Bronx and young adulthood mixed with my own memories of the mother I knew. The combination of her completed life and my ongoing lived experiences helped me to understand her better than before. I started to see things I’d missed.

A few years ago, I realized that the image of Mom I “saw” was no longer bound to this world. She’d become a vibrant flash of rose and gold, pulsating with light and love. Freed from the limitations of a body that no longer worked, she visited often. She attended my daughters’ weddings, blessed their newborns, remained a well of love and support. She was there during my brother’s difficult final year, so clear and strong that we spoke about it often. Not only was Mom not “gone,” she was present on her own terms.

I wrote the following on Mother’s Day 2016:

This is my third Mother’s Day without my mom, although I don’t need a special day to think about her. Not a day passes where she doesn’t cross my mind. There is always something I want to share with her, because she always wanted to know. We were her favorite reality show. She used to say that she’d never be ready to leave us, because she’d always want to see what happened next.

It will always startle me to look around a room during family gatherings and not see my mom where she usually was (right smack in the middle of whatever we were doing). But apparently she meant it when she said she’d never be ready to leave us, because I can finally say for certain that she is still here.

That’s what it’s called. Christmas creep. That’s when Christmas decorations and merchandise start appearing on retail shelves in early dribs and drabs. You may be buying Halloween candy when you hear your first Christmas carol of the year.

This isn’t a surprise. Commercial Christmas prep sped up years ago. For most merchants, the winter holiday season provides a major hunk of annual sales, so why not begin the spending reminders early? That’s especially true of a year like this one, where Thanksgiving falls late enough to leave only about four shopping weeks before Christmas. I could be irritated (Crass Commercialism!!!), but the fact is, I don’t really care. In fact, I kind of like it.

I’m not alone. Studies show that experiencing early decorations for the winter holidays spikes dopamine, the “reward” hormone that makes us feel good. The sparkling lights and colorful displays, the music we hear only seasonally … all of this helps us feel better than we did before. It makes sense that the early-decorating trend would spread beyond retail to homes.

Winter holidays bring the promise of light in the darkness, no matter what the odds. In a world filled with anxiety and sadness, that can lift beyond dopamine. Hope is the ultimate hygge.

This doesn’t explain the intensification of Halloween.

Halloween candy started hitting the shelves in mid-August, which is also when Spirit Halloween stores start popping up in retail spaces with nothing else to do. As with Christmas, early Halloween prep has seeped into non-commercial settings as well. I passed my first Halloween-decorated home about two weeks ago. (I’m not including my neighborhood giant skeleton, which stays up all year round and fulfills the apparently recent requirement that every neighborhood have one.)

Last year, there was more decorating for Halloween in my neighborhood than I could remember ever seeing before. I’m not talking charming, feel-good, “Welcome, Fall” stuff. I’m not even talking Mysterious Gothic. I’m talking blood, guts, and more fear than should ever fit into one yard. (Full disclosure: my “Scary Meter” doesn’t rise above those little floaty ghosts made from tissues and attached to tree branches.)

So, why do we do THAT thing? It seems so anti-hygge.

Our senses are heightened when we’re afraid and, once again, our brain releases dopamine. The key is knowing that no matter how scared (or grossed out) we may feel, we are safe. Deep inside, we know that after the scary experience ends, we will be fundamentally okay.

I’m guessing that unlike real life, the chemical rush of all that blood and gore puts us in a situation we believe we can actually control.

Maybe we start decorating early because we want to absorb every possible high from a time of year that lifts us out of the ordinary and into something magical. After all, the holidays themselves pass quickly. It doesn’t take long after Halloween for us to mentally finish with fall and jump into winter celebrations. As for Christmas, by the time New Year’s Day rolls around, most of us wish those same decorations that brought so much joy would just pack themselves away so that we can move on to organizing for the new year.

But that’s okay. At that point, the beginning creep of the next holiday season is only seven months away.

I still wasn’t a football fan in the years that followed. Baltimore’s attempts to acquire a new football team flew right over my head. Franchises bypassing Baltimore for Jacksonville and Charlotte? Didn’t register. I barely remember failed plans to buy the L.A. Rams.

It took until 1996 for Baltimore to land a football team. While the acquisition didn’t occupy prime space in my brain, I do remember the irony of a city that hated losing their beloved Colts to Indianapolis doing something similar to Cleveland and their Browns.

The team officially became the Baltimore Ravens on March 29, 1996, exactly twelve years after the Colts left. Their name was chosen via a telephone survey of over 30,000 fans. “Ravens” won in a landslide, easily beating out “Marauders” and “Americans.” I thought that if asked, I would have chosen “Ravens,” too. I still knew nothing about football, but it was fun having an opinion about something so many people were talking about.

Two months later, at a packed event held at Baltimore’s Harborplace, the Ravens officially introduced their team logo, uniforms, and colors (purple, black, and metallic gold). Football was back in Baltimore. Although I still didn’t understand the game, I was beginning to understand the camaraderie that came along with it.

As years passed, I realized that despite my own football disconnect, I’d somehow raised Ravens fans. Game days were exciting for my girls. Listening to the whoops and groans coming from downstairs, I felt I was missing out by not watching with them. Wanting to join in was the last push I needed to finally learn the game.

I came for the camaraderie and the snacks, but I didn’t know the half of it back then. Obviously, being a Ravens fan meant instant community in Baltimore. I just didn’t realize how many fans I’d meet outside of Ravens territory:

Granville Island, Vancouver: My husband doubles back to the restaurant we just left to retrieve the Ravens windbreaker he left behind. The hostess whips around from behind the counter, windbreaker in hand. This native British Columbian is a die-hard Lamar Jackson fan eager to talk Baltimore football.

Thunder Bay, Ontario: We may be chillaxing at a place on the northwest shore of Lake Superior, but being Baltimore Ravens fans scores us a free beer flight from the general manager. The Ravens originally snagged him with their defense, and he’s never let go. His dream is to attend a game at M&T Bank Stadium.

Savannah, GA: On a Sunday afternoon, a Flock of Ravens fans gathers as usual at an outdoor bar to watch the game. This is where we meet a trainer for the Buffalo Bills who hopes his NFL career arc eventually leads him to Baltimore.

Reykjavik, Iceland: It’s a few days before Christmas, cold enough that my husband wears his Ravens knit hat. A car passes our part of the sidewalk. “Go Ravens!” its inhabitants holler out the window.

Of course, team recognition works both ways. My daughter’s choice to wear her Ravens hat in Philadelphia sparked a different sort of conversation as several Philadelphia Eagles fans assured us that their team would beat our team that season (I don’t want to talk about it). The exchange was good-natured … but maybe don’t wear the hat in Pittsburgh.

There’s a lot wrong with this world. There are problems with football, too, but rooting for the same team provides that rare opportunity when we’re all on the same side, hoping for the same outcome. I’d like to think that any time this happens, we have an opportunity to bridge some gaps and establish a more human connection.

A new NFL season starts today. Watch responsibly. Be kind. And – Go Ravens!

Those plastic tubs are where the problem lies.

I’ve written before about my major concern with my journals: what happens to them when I’m no longer available to explain, defend, discuss the entries? What happens if someone reads a section that not only makes them feel less than they are, but doesn’t represent how I truly felt about them? After all, my journal entries are not erudite reflections on the world around me. They’re more like workbooks, gathering my scattered thoughts and helping me reel them in. They can read pretty rough.

Because one concern is never enough, lately I’ve developed an additional one. Never mind what I’ve written in those volumes; what about the stuff I haven’t written? I’ve shared pivotal experiences and important conversations with people who matter deeply to me, yet didn’t record them in my journal. Could that make it seem like what happened between us didn’t matter, that it had no impact at all?

There are reasons why some significant events don’t show up in my journal pages, and none of those reasons have anything to do with not making a cut. Sometimes, a situation is too important or profound for words to do it justice. That may sound odd, given that I’m a writer. But I have great respect for both the depth of words and the reach of action, and some events feel too multidimensional to be confined by only two. Reflecting them accurately on paper requires time and space, and I don’t always have enough of either.

Sometimes, something that happens hurts too much. I need time for the fabric of my life to rearrange before I can write about the hit, because committing it to paper makes it “real.” This means an event can be long past by the time I get to it, the emotion of it diluted to a point where I can handle it.

I won’t lie: the weight of what to do with these journals has exercised a tiny bit of a chilling effect on what I write. There are thoughts I don’t want to commit to paper … which would seem to negate the point of a journal altogether. But journaling still works for me. My journal remains a place to process emotions that have nowhere else to go. My little part of the universe is probably a safer place because I keep a journal. I’m just more aware these days of causing future hurt.

I used to joke that I would reread each of my journals at the end of my life, burning or keeping pages as I went along. Back then, that day felt far enough away that I could smile at the image.

I’m not smiling anymore.

Whatever I decide to do with that mountain of journals, I hope they’re merely a footnote in the way people remember me. The absence of complete documentation only proves that I was too busy actually living to take the time to write everything down. I was fully present: loving, absorbing, being there. The journals aren’t an unabridged autobiography – they’re just the scrap paper that helped me show up for the real thing.

I get that. Change can feel catastrophic, even if it’s something we’ve always dreamed about. It often feels like a door slams behind us long before we’re ready to leave the building.

Sometimes I miss parts of my life so intensely that they’re almost tangible. But the past I long for is illusory. I forget that those times I miss so much often felt as uncertain and messy as the present can feel right now. Even if I could re-insert myself into the past, I’m not the same person I was back then, and I wouldn’t react to situations in the same way.

Clinging to the past is grasping at a vapor.

Much of my longing isn’t for the times themselves but for what they represent. I miss my children’s childhoods, but I don’t need to go back to actively raising them. What I really miss is the ability to protect them, nurture them, watch them absorb new experiences and knowledge. I miss the mom friends I had back in those days, watching their children grow alongside mine. When I miss practicing law, it doesn’t mean I want to dive back into the intensity of that world–it’s missing a sense of accomplishment and purpose, using my mind in a very specific way. And missing my band days? No, I don’t want to sing in a band anymore. I just miss who I was back then, the rush of being onstage, the chance to craft a song.

I appreciate the opportunity to time-travel through my memories. Distance provides insight. Revisiting the past helps me understand more than I did the first time I passed through.

Maybe this is what I’d tell my mom, who cried long after she moved into the new house she eventually came to love: change doesn’t move us forward in a straight line–it’s multidimensional. Everything we’ve experienced stays with us. When I loosen my grip on a past event itself, memory gives me new ways to understand who I was then and am now.

And this can lead to some really wonderful places.

For those unfamiliar with mummering, it involves people disguising themselves and coming to your house to make you guess who they are. Their heads will be covered with cloth, making them resemble the Scarecrow from the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz. Their hodgepodge clothing might be stuffed with rags or pillows so that if you poke them (this is a poking situation), you won’t be able to ascertain their body shape. If you answer their knock on the door, they will distort their voices to ask “Any mummers allowed in?” I’m not sure what happens if you say “No.”

Once you figure out a mummer’s identity, they will remove their mask. Then you’ll get to feed them, provide drinks, and become a mummer yourself so that you can join them at their next stop.

This sounds like a zombie apocalypse movie to me.

Mummering has a long history in Newfoundland, most likely brought by settlers from Ireland in the early 19th century. Still, I can’t unknow the fact that mummering was outlawed in Newfoundland in 1861 after a group of masked mummers killed a man.

Which basically confirms every one of my deepest fears.

Newfoundland may be ground zero for mummering, but since the tradition usually occurs around Christmas, I thought a June visit would be safe. It wasn’t. The St. Anthony Iceberg Festival celebrates icebergs, Vikings, spring … and Newfoundland culture. This meant that most of the events happening throughout the region happily promised a visit from mummers. I took these as warnings and knew I’d have to choose carefully if I didn’t want to miss out on other experiences.

I took a closer look at my fear. Which part of mummering concerned me the most? It was supposed to be fun. What made me want to hide?

Covered faces. Disguised voices. Concealed identity. What could possibly go wrong? But if I was being honest, the scariest part to me was that a mummer might force me to engage. I avoid audience participation at all costs. I did not want to be the target of revelry, no matter how “fun” it was cracked up to be.

Continuing southeast across Newfoundland, I finally found a mummering experience I could deal with on my own, safe terms: a performance at the Twillingate New World Island Dinner Theater. It was a Newfoundland “kitchen party” filled with songs and traditions, including … guess. Up on the stage far away from me, dancing mummers appeared. They pranced around with ugly sticks and enthusiasm. I told myself they couldn’t reach me without alighting from the stage and bolting over rows of tables. There was no chance for contact. All I had to do was watch and learn.

I did not hyperventilate or run from the room. Nor did I look away.

But–I still don’t want to meet mummers up close and personal.

Context is everything. I do understand the need to create diversions and entertainment in the midst of a long, isolated winter.

But, please, don’t come to my house.