by Jeannie Ralston | Apr 5, 2023
I knew the male gaze would someday fade away, as surely as the headiness of a new shoe purchase does. So I wasn’t overly bothered when, in my early 50s, men’s eyes began to go right through me like X-ray vision. Much more disconcerting was becoming invisible to other...
by Jeannie Ralston | Mar 15, 2023
When I was in my teens, my eyebrows looked like dark caterpillars perched on my forehead. Wooly is the word that comes to mind. In some old photos, my overpowering eyebrows made me look a bit mannish and my eyes look small, like little BBs. As I got older, I took to...
by Jeannie Ralston | Mar 8, 2023
As I danced on the edge of the Pacific and watched the ocean swallow up the sun, producing the violent layer cake of reds and yellows and the green flash I’d heard about but rarely seen, I thought the world couldn’t be more beautiful—but I was wrong. I was...
by Jeannie Ralston | Jan 18, 2023
Five years ago, I lost my father, and a few months ago, my mother moved to an apartment in a senior community. That left our house on a large wooded lot, empty of people but not of things. God knows, not of things. Before we could put it on the market, as my mother...
by Jeannie Ralston | Jan 9, 2023
Thinking back on the long weekend I spent with 11 women in Charleston, S.C., I’m trying to decide when was the moment that we realized we had a whole set of new best friends. Was it the van ride back to the hotel after our cookout on the beach? When our driver...
