It’s been quite the summer, hasn’t it? For me, it’s meant spending lots of precious time with two charmers I’m madly in love with: my darling grandkids are 7-year old Everly Rose and 16-month old Baby Zack. (Grandchildren – I highly recommend them!) It’s also meant the exhaustion of trying to stay cool during our unprecedented heat waves here on the west coast (as you know, high temperatures can be brutally hard on heart patients). And it’s meant countless hours out on my little balcony, immersed in a new obsession that’s turned into a complicated late-COVID project for me: learning how to grow roses in pots. Continue reading “Balcony roses: my late summer review”
Category: Heart Sisters
Writing about hearts – and now roses
Regular Heart Sisters blog readers may have recently noticed that the Sunday morning blog posts I’ve been publishing here since 2009 have slowed down. Well, not just slowed. They’ve stopped. With spring in the air and my new balcony rose garden on my mind, I’m taking a summer break from writing about women’s hearts. Instead, I’m pulling on my gardening gloves and exploring my latest infatuation: is it possible to grow roses in pots out on a balcony?
And like many writers, the urge to document my summer adventure has turned into a little blog. It’s called The Novice Rose Gardener. For quite a while, I’ve felt the need to write about the things in life that bring me PURE JOY. In the final paragraphs of my last published blog post here, for example, I hinted that I needed a wee break to do just that. Although I’ve been an avid gardener here on the west coast for decades, I’ve never been tempted to grow roses – however lovely the photo on the rose tag may be – mostly because of their nasty reputation: high maintenance, short blooming season, black spot, powdery mildew, aphids. No thanks!
But – something wonderful happened last summer. . Continue reading “Writing about hearts – and now roses”
Heart Month awareness: doing the same thing, yet expecting different results
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
February is our shortest month of the year and also the month officially acknowledged almost everywhere as Heart Health Awareness Month. Then we all turn the calendar page and glide over to March, the official month of Liver Health Awareness, Disability Awareness, Ovarian Cancer Awareness, Red Cross Awareness worldwide – and many other causes. My niggling question remains: do these assorted official days/weeks/months of awareness-raising actually help to raise awareness out there? Continue reading “Heart Month awareness: doing the same thing, yet expecting different results”
10 years after my mother’s death
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
It will be ten years ago tomorrow that, after hearing the news on the phone, I re-read the chapter called When Your Mother Dies, in Rona Maynard’s wonderful book, My Mother’s Daughter:
“Baby showers herald the transition to motherhood. Roses, greeting cards and invitations to brunch celebrate mothers every May. Yet, despite our culture’s motherhood mystique, no rituals mark the psychological journey we daughters begin when our mothers die.” Continue reading “10 years after my mother’s death”
Heart Sisters 