Beach House in the Burbs

In honor of Halloween, pull up a comfy chair, fix yourself a cup of hot cider, roast some marshmallows for s’mores, and I’ll tell you a true ghost story. When I was about 10 years old, Grandma’s neighborhood was going downhill. She was considering selling her house, encouraged by my dad and my aunt, who wanted her to live somewhere safer. But Grandma was dragging her feet about the move. She'd raised my dad and my aunt in that house. My grandfather had died in that house. It was her home. When a man bit off a policeman’s ear in Grandma’s front yard, she decided it was time to go. She sold her house and moved to a “better” neighborhood. The next month, when she was out of town for the weekend, her house in the better neighborhood was robbed. She came home to find they’d taken everything. The refrigerator stood open, and the food was gone; drawers were missing from the dressers; the handmade antique clock that had marked time on her mantle for years had disappeared; clothes, jewelry,...

This opinionated, this funny and this eloquent. There's some discussion in the comments about whether or not the bloggers really are in their 80s, but maybe that's beside the point. Given the number of hits and comments they're getting, they've struck a chord with a lot of people. Meet Margaret and Helen .

At the edge of the caldera, in the tiny town of Fira, on Santorini, my sister, Susan, and I peered out at the Agean Sea, marveling at a blue they created just for Greece. Our eyes traveled to donkeys ferrying people and things up from the boats docked at the old port below. I don’t remember which of us thought it would be fun to hike the zigzagged path to the port, then ride a donkey back up, but it was a terrible, scary, asinine, stupid idea. It was still fairly early in the morning when we started down the thousands of wide, uneven, cobblestone, horror-movie steps. But the sun that beat on the island in August didn't have a clock. We'd finished our water and worked up a sweat before we hit the half-way point. At the port we poked into gift shops, bought a couple of trinkets and drank more water before seeking out our animal transport. We climbed a few steps, handed over our money and sat down on the next donkey that waited beside the top step. A mother and her two...

I've been too busy to blog lately, but this week I'm going to try to make up for it. Tomorrow I'm part of a blogapalooza put together by Angela Nickerson at her travel blog Just Go . Participating blogs will all have stories about a harrowing journey, just in time for Halloween. She's also got goodie bags to give away to several lucky comment-leaving Trick or Treaters. My post is about a ride on a "Donkey with a Death Wish." Check back tomorrow for that and hit Just Go for more on the goodie bags and to see who else has had a harrowing journey. On Friday, in honor of the spooky day, I'll post a true ghost story about my grandmother, called, appropriately enough, "Grandma's Ghosts."

When my nephews were little and cute, I can remember wondering if I'd still love them when they got to be big. What if they grew up and weren't any fun? What if they were mean? What if they were boring? I wasn't even going to venture into what if they became ax murderers, or worse. I was just worried about not liking them. They are now 14, 11 and 9, teetering between childhood and adulthood. When I called their house last week, Eli, the 14-year-old, answered, and because they have caller ID, he launched immediately into, "Aunt Karen, there's an air show this weekend. Don't you want to go?" Since Chris (my non-workaholic, he says, but constantly working husband) had to work, and my sister and her husband viewed this as an opportunity to ditch their offspring for a few hours, I took them on my own. The day was beautiful, sunny and warm, but not hot. We rode a shuttle bus that arrived at the show just in time for us to see the F-22 Raptor through the bus win...

Okay, it’s a stretch to tie a lovely wedding to the mess that’s all over my car, but since they both involved love and I have pictures, I thought I’d give it a shot. Sometimes you need a challenge. So, in chronological order: Attack of the love bugs, Part I I drove from my house north of Atlanta to south-central Georgia a couple of weeks ago. I write about economic development (an elusive concept these days) in various Georgia counties for Georgia Trend magazine and was headed off to learn all there was to know about Coffee County. The first thing I learned is that to get there in late September you have to drive through the mating love bugs . Not only do they swarm so disgustingly that you can hardly see to drive through them, but they dry on the car in an instant. Then it takes dynamite and a crowbar to get the nasty bits off. I fretted a little about not making a professional impression, what with my car looking like a giant had upchucked on it. But at least two out of three cars i...

Every eye in the tent was on the woman sitting on a stool on a bare wooden stage talking about how she’d have lost her virginity if only the police hadn’t interrupted at a crucial moment the carefully researched and staged event. No one gasped or tut-tutted at the indelicate subject matter. We were too busy wiping the tears of laughter that ran from our eyes. Beth Horner , the virgin under discussion, was followed by Bil Lepp , who told us about how one of his college buddies, Paul, had built a submarine in his dorm room their senior year. The sub was so big they had to blast a hole in the dorm wall to get the pig-pink contraption out. (Bil won the West Virginia State liar's contest several years running.) The National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, which comes up the first weekend of October each year, is like sitting around the Thanksgiving table enjoying a feast of the best family stories—with 20,000 of your closest friends and assuming your family includes t...