The first time I met acclaimed artisan Barney Bellinger, he was walking in my sister's house with a school kid's grin and a big basket of mushrooms.

In the February issue of "More" magazine, blogger Lee Woodruff wrote about a stunning suicide pact she made with her sisters. The story begins below. ...

We are a society of over-communicators. We text while we paint our toenails, we tweet while we're getting frisky. We feel a sense of rising panic if we haven't responded to someone in 24 hours. I'm nostalgic for my old black cord phone and I'm working on a healthier balance.

I'm one of those people who never reads a book twice or doesn't like to see a movie again. But twenty years into my marriage, I broke my rule to re-read Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.

After a year as senior editor on Huff/Post50, I'm leaving my post to take a new position in the company. I enjoyed many things about the role, but the...

"What's wrong with your eye?" my husband asks, squinting, patting himself down to find his reading glasses (I've been tempted to duct-tape them to the bridge of his nose). When my pores come into focus, he recoils. I've firmly moved into Night of the Living Dead territory, but I'm too tired to care.

It is inconceivable to me that my father has been asking to "go home" to the assisted living facility. But this IS your home, I think, the home of your heart. This is your "sacred" place, the spot where you found joy and sanctuary.

Picking was also about tending a friendship, sustaining the strong parts and feeling tenderly for the weaker places. Nothing was off-limits, in that easy way that lifelong friends have with one another.

More than 10 years after 9/11, we are tentative patriots. We gauge our neighbors' politics, we stick a finger in the air to test the atmosphere before considering a declaration of love for our country.

Nora Ephron wrote about aging with honestly so that the rest of us could feel better about our necks, our knees and our plastic surgery choices.

Had my puritanical approach to parenting been so extreme that my child's first response to a spa trip invitation was to cock her head suspiciously and look for a chemo IV?

This is the era of Facebook and Match.com. We can go right to the visual and decide if we want to fondle the goods or click on by. The cover of a book is the eye candy for the IQ inside. It's the hooked worm on the bobber.

As I swam my laps, I wondered idly if I really was too old to have kids this young? Was biology nature's way of saying, "you won't have the energy for this in a few years?" And yet how many of us are successful at making life fall in line with the perfect time to marry, procreate or change careers?

Young women today tell me they will not delay childbearing. They have seen too many women wake up at 40 wearing the "I forgot to have kids" sandwich board. And I hold my tongue. There is no cookie-cutter approach to any of this, no one-size-fits-all.

Recipes are the currency by which generations of women define and distinguish themselves from other families. These sometimes-secret formulas, handed down from mother to daughter, are inscriptions of endearment, the personal stamp encrypted in each dish like DNA.

Lee Woodruff of CBS This Morning tells the poignant story of college sweethearts who are rebuilding their life together after the husband sustained a ...

But there is one item of clothing about which I do wax nostalgic. My colored Levi's corduroys. Price: $35.00, which was a lot of chinkaloopas in high school.