Chronicles of Marna

During one of the first yoga classes I took in 1996, I puzzled over the instructor’s guidance to “Do these postures with a feeling of gratitude in your heart.” How did I conjure a feeling of gratitude out of thin…

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My daughter has eight mothers. That’s a lot to remember on Mother’s Day. No, we don’t have a Big Love/Sister Wives situation. They are the mothers in the host families who sponsored her when she was an exchange student and…

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My dentist is stalking me, or rather her office is. They have texted, emailed, and left me two voicemails reminding me of my cleaning and asking me to confirm their confirmation. This after the receptionist watched me enter it into…

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Do you dare cross the Vermilion Border?   It sounds like a setting from Game of Thrones. A legendary place where epic battles were fought and kingdoms won and lost. A setting long ago and far away. Nay, the Vermilion Border…

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“Why,” my mom asked, peering into my hall closet, “do you have so many coats?” A few years earlier, my son studied the coats hanging on hooks in our mudroom and said the same thing: “They’re all yours.” They were…

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Over the holidays while I languished on the couch after knee surgery, I had the decadent experience of watching lots of television. One evening, I stopped channel surfing at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, an annual extravaganza of impossibly skinny…

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An item bouncing around the internet declares there are two kinds of people in the world: those who return shopping carts and those who don’t. Some would say this is an oversimplification, but I think it’s a useful distinction. The…

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