Lazy Germophobe

Today I was rummaging around in my basket of hair products and found my anti-aging serum . Ha! I haven’t used it for months. It’s not going to keep me young at the bottom of a basket. Speaking of aging, Paulina Porizkova was trending recently for posting a makeup-free selfie and an honest rant about getting older and the pressure to delay looking old for as long as possible. She’s 54. Like so many women our age, she struggles with saggy skin and the decision of when/whether to go gray. I love what she has to say ("I’ve changed my vision to gray hair being sexy and confident”), but her post still focuses on looks—how to embrace the appearance of our older faces and bodies—instead of how we think, act, and feel. I guess that’s a job hazard for a supermodel. Although, model or not, it truly is that glimpse in the mirror more than anything else that reminds us we are eternal beings housed in aging vessels. From the book Hardwired: Finding the God You Already Kno...

This is my nineteenth Vermont winter. I've decided that’s enough years for me to assert that January 2020 was too warm. It’s supposed to remain below freezing around the clock, except for a brief thaw when everyone washes their cars. Temperatures that stay in the teens or 20s make for beautiful, clean snow, tundra-like dirt roads (easy to navigate), and best of all, no mud—and NO BUGS. In January I get a break from giving the dogs their twenty-bucks-a-pop flea and tick medicine, and I normally don’t have to inspect them (or myself) for ticks after a walk. This year, though, we saw 30s and 40s, meaning slush, mud, and even bugs. It felt like March. On my walks in the snow I noticed the snow fleas. I remember being kind of freaked the first time I ever saw them up here. I kept seeing black dirt on the snow on warmer days, which didn’t make sense because I was nowhere near a road. When I looked more closely, the dirt was jumping. FLEAS! They looked just like in that ...

  My 11-year-old has been going to taekwondo twice a week since the year he started kindergarten. Classes are held in a fitness center; every time I drop him off, I long to be one of those exercisey people I see at the gym. In six years I have not made it happen. I started yoga at home last year after “discovering” Yoga with Adriene but couldn’t make it a habit, even though Adriene is adorable and I love her. Because of my lifelong struggle to make an exercise regimen stick, every few years I get amnesia and think “I should try running again! I probably didn’t give it a fair shake last time.” The last time, I tried Couch to 5K and failed. I concluded that some bodies are just not meant to run. For me the problem is the lungs. I truly feel they’re going to explode. In late August, as the boys’ summer break came to a close, I reluctantly googled “Couch to 5K” (thinking I should try again) and got an unexpected hit: None To Run , a program gentler and mor...