Senior Women Web

"The condition of the costume at the time of purchase was startling. The hem of the skirt was black inside and out. All parts were soiled. There was extensive water-borne staining throughout; the proper left sleeve of the jacket and front of the skirt both had large stains down their entire length that had hardened to the consistency of cardboard. The whole ensemble was very heavily creased and misshapen. The waist of the skirt had been taken apart and cobbled together again in haphazard gathers. As one of my colleagues succinctly put it — it was a mess!" more »

President Obama peppered his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation with facts, which were mostly right but sometimes cherry-picked, strained or otherwise misleading. The Republican response had its problems, too. more »

A faint, brief cheeping broke through the layers of human noise and caught my attention. My head turned quickly to the side of the house, waiting during the pause to pinpoint the source. More cheeping … and my ears reported to my brain that it wasn’t coming from a nest up in the branches, but from the ground. I was reluctant to step off the porch without knowing where it was safe to set my foot down.The baby bird called out with urgency as I inched my way toward his voice. I discovered him half buried in leaves that had blown up against the house during a storm. Perhaps the same storm had tossed him out of his parents’ nest of twigs and warm downy feathers. more »

"If the United States continues on its present course, it will face a united Europe that has made great strides toward providing family-support laws and institutions — and less developed countries where work-family conflict for professional-managerial and often even middle-income families is muted by the availability of extremely cheap domestic labor. To ensure the United States provides quality care for the next generation of workers, while at the same time utilizing effectively the human capital of its mothers, fathers, and all caregivers, we need to get serious about work-family public policy." more »