The process of learning what foods we like can be fun. It’s not so fun to find out what we don’t like. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog Post 57. Copyright 2024 Maybe I am the recipient of a little bit of poetic justice. When I met my future daughter-in-law, I thought she was polite and sweet—until dinnertime. She came to our house to eat a birthday dinner, but she didn’t eat any of the pasta sauce my husband had prepared from scratch for this special occasion. I started writing her off as rude and self-centered. Now, a decade later, I am the one refusing the homemade sauce, the yeasty bread, the ..read more

The view from my chair is comforting. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog Post 55. Copyright 2023 The governor of Maine was on the screen of my family room TV in Metro Atlanta. But as I listened to her update the press about the shooter in the two terrible attacks in Lewiston, I didn’t hear the governor’s voice. She was just Janet, a woman I knew from church. She had grown up in the house that my office and the writing center occupied. She had taken her husband to doctor appointments after his stroke. The governor was a person. And Maine was her place. For a moment, Maine was my place, too. While I ..read more

My rainbow is imperfect. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog Post 54. Copyright 2023 I was working with a client in the writing center. We had been crowded that day. Lots of papers were due. This student’s professor was a stickler for grammar rules. The student writer had a pronoun antecedent disagreement issue. “A child develops in their own time.” I had said to my students for a few years that I thought pronoun antecedent disagreement would become less of an issue during my lifetime and possibly may even be dropped from middle school grammar books. Meanwhile, I told them, I would continue to teac ..read more

Grandma Swartz and Jonah by Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog post 53. Copyright 2023 “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” –Carl Sandburg Grandma Roberts and Jonah “A baby is God’s opinion that I should go on.” Soon-to-be Grandma Grandma Shirley and Jonah I wonder sometimes what my purpose is, why I continue. Like many folks, I felt the weight of the big questions during the pandemic, when we were left alone in our homes to ponder our belly buttons. Remember how, at the beginning, we thought we could finally get that closet cleaned out because we’d have time? And how we thought th ..read more

A luggage cart, a plastic tote, and a couple of bungee cords, and I had a snow-resistant cart that I could roll all over campus. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog post 51. Copyright 2022 I was one of those people who always seem to be working. I would carry a briefcase and a stack of books home with me each night. As I got older, the books got heavier. By the time I was 40, I was carrying the load in a cross-body bag that seemed to spread out the weight. Then I wore sandals to a community theater rehearsal of A Christmas Carol, not realizing we’d be learning the Fezziwig choreography. I carried a ..read more

Gordon’s eyes were not smiling. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog post 50. Copyright 2022 In just about every picture of little kid me with my three brothers, Gordon is carrying me. I don’t remember all that well, but the photographic evidence shows that I must have spent a lot of time on his hip. I do remember watching out the front window for my big brother to come home from school and cheering for him at football games. I remember my confusion when, after a meal, he pushed back from the table and said he was going to join the Marine Corps. I didn’t know what the Marine Corps was, but I think I ..read more

My hair was the easiest way to cover my scar before it had healed enough to use makeup to hide it. I don’t cover it up anymore. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog post 49. Copyright 2022 I have a scar on my face, the kind of scar that makes me divide my life into before the car wreck and after the car wreck. Mother had picked me up from Billie Jean’s on a Sunday morning for church. I remember that she and my new stepfather were going to be out late, and she wasn’t comfortable with leaving her 10-year-old daughter at home alone. Billie Jean had a little girl I adored, just young enough for me to fee ..read more

Our family deals with challenges by learning. Information helps us process. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog post 48. Copyright 2022 We stepped off the T holding hands so that The Boy wouldn’t get lost in the rush of subway passengers. He hung between us, his arms stretched as far as the seams on his puffy winter coat would allow. We were on an adventure, and our six-year-old son was smiling, even though we could tell he was anxious by his number of blinks per minute. We had driven from our apartment in western Maine to the outskirts of Boston for Rugrats Live at the Fleet Center and we had alrea ..read more

I look for miracles everywhere. Otherwise, I’ll never see them. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog post 47. Copyright 2021 This blog post is about miracles. I use that word on a regular basis. I need to. I need to see the miracles in my life. I remember seeing an interview with Brandon Lee, who talked about the limited number of good memory-making days any one person can experience in a lifetime. Even the number of times we will be able to call up a memory is not limitless, even though we think of life as an “inexhaustible well.” Lee would die on a movie set only days after the interview, shot by a ..read more

I don’t need much to make fudge, one of my favorite guilty pleasures. By Teresa Swartz Roberts Blog post 46. Copyright 2021 I remember my little bare feet standing on a chair in front of the kitchen stove and being allowed to stir milk and sugar and cocoa powder together. It was my job to watch the pot, which did eventually boil. Mother waited a few minutes, then dipped a spoon into the mixture and let it drip into a cup of water. She was looking  for something called the “soft ball” stage. I didn’t understand what that meant. But Mother knew, and she knew just how long to let the fudge ..read more