LivingBest Bourbon for Beginners: Start Here, Not There
You don't need an expensive bottle or anyone's permission. You need a glass, a porch, and about twenty-five dollars.
Living
Food, golf, travel, relationships, and the outdoor life. Writing from people who know what they are talking about.
Living
LivingThe Long Table #6: First of the Season
The strawberries arrive on their own schedule, and Jean has learned not to rush them.
LivingIndependent Living vs Assisted Living: The Conversation That Changes Everything
Most families don't start with the brochures. They start with a phone call that changes the weather in the room.
LivingPickleball Rules for Beginners: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before My First Game
The rules are simpler than they look. The hard part is unlearning what your tennis elbow already knows.
LivingThe Cheapest Places to Retire (And Why Cheap Is the Wrong Word)
The most affordable places to retire are not the saddest ones. They are, quite often, the most alive.
The TableThe Best Scotch Under $100 Is Better Than You Think
I came to scotch late, skeptical of the price and the pretension, and found that neither was required.
LivingMorel Season
They arrive in a paper bag, still wearing the woods, and for two or three weeks Jean remembers what lucky feels like.
LivingThe Best Golf Clubs for Seniors: What Your Swing Actually Needs Now
Your body changed. Your swing changed. It might be time your clubs caught up.
LivingAustin, Texas: What Retirees Actually Think After Moving Here
I spent two weeks in Austin talking to people who moved there after sixty. Some of them love it. Some of them are already looking at the Hill Country. All of them have opinions about the heat.
LivingThe Marriage That Went Quiet
Not a fight. Not an affair. Not a betrayal anyone could name. Just two people in the same house who stopped arriving at each other.
TravelThe Best States to Retire In: An Honest Assessment From Someone Who Has Driven Through All of Them
Everybody ranks the states. Nobody tells you what they feel like on a Wednesday in January. Here is what I know after seventy years and a lot of windshield time.
TravelRetire in Portugal: What I Found When I Went Looking
Every retirement conversation I've had in three years eventually turns to Portugal. So I went back, walked the streets, and wrote down what I actually found.
LivingWhat Easter Asks of You
The eggs that belong to someone else's mother, and the Easter table that keeps getting set.
The TableA Place Worth the Drive
Forty-five minutes south of San Antonio, a family restaurant reminded me why I do this.
LivingThe Best Pickleball Paddles I Have Actually Used
I came to pickleball the way I come to most things: reluctantly, then honestly. Five paddles later, I have opinions.
LivingWhen the House Becomes Too Much
Downsizing isn't about square footage. It's about what you thought your life was going to look like.
TravelThe Best Places to Retire in America: What I Found After Looking at Fifty of Them
Most best-places-to-retire lists are written by people who have never spent a week in the places they recommend. I have spent years.
DiningWhy Every Restaurant Is So Loud Now
I can't hear my wife across a two-top, and I'm starting to think that's the point.
LivingThe First Asparagus
At the Yellow Springs Farmers Market, the season's first serious vegetable arrives, and something in the kitchen wakes up with it.
LivingThe Push Cart
I carried my bag for twenty-eight years. The push cart was not a defeat. It was a recalculation.
LivingWhen Adult Children Drift
Not estrangement. Something quieter. The son who calls less. The daughter who schedules you like an appointment. The holiday that went well and still left you hollow.
LivingThe First Day Back on the Water
The AuSable tailwater below Mio runs cold in late March. The grass is still brown. Nothing is hatching. You go anyway.
LivingThe Men Who Have Nobody to Call
The loneliest Americans may be men in their sixties and seventies who outlived their friendships and never noticed it happening.
LivingWhat Tuesday Teaches
The weeknight meal nobody writes about, and the woman who has been making it for decades.
LivingThe Conversation I Keep Not Having
We all have one. The thing we need to say to someone we love, and the long list of reasons we keep not saying it.
LivingThe First Real Morning
There is a morning in late March when the season announces itself, not with warmth exactly, but with a quality of light that is different from all the light that came before it.
LivingThe Soup She Never Wrote Down
A pot of spring soup and the recipe that lives only in memory and muscle.