By the time I arrived, the alumni field hockey game had already started. It was cold and misty, but the women on the field hardly noticed. I watched, awed by the incredible fitness, skill and determination of both the alums in their purple T-shirts and the current team in uniform.

I felt shy, as I always do when I’m watching the current incarnation of my former collegiate team. It’s difficult to believe that the women on the field — most on scholarship, all top-ranked on their high school teams — have anything in common with the dumpy uniforms, ad hoc practice facilities and determined but random collection of players that make up my field hockey memories. It was even harder to imagine that any part of my life now — as a slightly out-of-shape wife, mother and journalist — would be even remotely interesting to them.

Turns out I was wrong. (Read the rest of my Sunday column HERE.)

I’m just back from one of the sweetest weekends I’ve ever spent at Northwestern — my first-ever Women’s Sports Reunion Weekend. It all started when my pal Christine Brennan realized that many of the incredibly successful NU women athletes these days are seriously worried about what they’ll do when their playing days end, and even if they aren’t, we old-timers (and more young-timers) can offer them help/contacts/advice. So off I went … and it was SO much better than I expected.

The highlights:

– Watching our THREE TIME national champion women’s lacrosse team demolish North Carolina on Senior Day, 16-3. Lindsay North, a senior I’d met the day before at the mentoring sessions, scored a goal in her last home game. Can we say four-peat? (That’s their amazing Lakeside Field, on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the photo.)

– Hearing the story I’d read all over from the woman who lived it: Anucha Browne Sanders (NU Basketball ‘85), Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t really do a very good job of talking about death, either to our kids, or to each other.

At the first funeral I ever went to, when I was about 12, the grownups kept asking me if it didn’t look like Great-Uncle John was “sleeping.” Well, no, I thought. It looks like he’s dead. But I didn’t say so.

More recently, I’ve had to think about how to talk about death with my 8-year-old, and not because I wanted to.

Our precious dog died recently, late one night after Tomas had gone to sleep. The next morning, his dad and I told him, and waited to see what would happen. There were lots of tears and questions, but after a while, he tucked a favorite picture of C.B. into his pocket, and went off to school.

The next day he drew an elaborate cartoon of C.B. boarding an airplane taking off into the clouds, with the cheerful caption, “Have a good time in heaven!”  For Tomas, C.B. had been a good dog, and when she died, she went to heaven. It was that simple.

I wish it were that simple for me.

Click here to read the rest of my column from today’s Commercial Appeal, and be sure to share your thoughts on Easter, death and resurrection by leaving a comment below.

You know how sometimes you have a problem that just keeps bugging you and bugging you, then suddenly the answer falls out of the sky?

That’s how it’s been for me with this blog. As you know, I dreamed up iDivamemphis back in the dark ages of 2006 – two years is like 10 in blog years — and just loved what happened next. We’ve had great conversation, a few rousing arguments, but mostly discovered what we probably already knew: That talking to each other is the source of our greatest strength and inspiration. Then I started writing about our conversations in The CA.

Then last summer I became the editor of skirt!, a terrific new magazine for women in Memphis — click the button under the ad window to find out where to pick up your free copy — and life changed again. Got WAY busier. I had less and less time for blogging.

What to do? How to keep all of these balls in the air? (Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt this way.) So I did what I usually do with an intractable problem: I started whining about it to my girlfriends. Asking their advice. Trying out different ideas, and seeing what their reactions would be.

Finally, I have the answer, and she is the one in the totally great dress in the picture at the top of this post. Please meet Kalisa, local blogger, hilarious writer, and someone I think you’ll enjoy getting to know as she joins me blogging a few times a week. At the moment, she’s looking for an alias, you know, not because she doesn’t want you to know who she is (God knows anyone who blogs is WAY over that), but because, as she says, she sucks at thinking of that kind of stuff.

So, gentle readers, what should my terrific new blogging pal be called? And The Diva is already taken …

I miss my moms.

We came together as a group during one of those important transition moments: Our kids were leaving their safe, nurturing child care center, heading for “big school.” All working moms, we were struggling with the guilt of changing circumstances, wondering if we’d made the right decisions about the next steps for our kids.

Nine of us had kids around the same age, and we needed each other.

Click here to read the rest of my column, and then tell me what you thought — have you been in mom’s groups, or book clubs or any other kind of regular group that’s lasted a long time? What are your secrets? Why did it last?