Same front steps since 1961. New everything behind them.

My grandmother lived at Old Main in the seventies. Now my mother is in the same wing, two doors down. The floors still creak in the same spot, and that made us both cry a little on move-in day.

I taught fourth grade for thirty-one years. Half the staff here were my students, and they still won't call me by my first name.

Dad had been eating cereal for supper since Mom passed. Now he has a regular table, two meals a day and opinions about the cobbler.

The lecture series is the best thing in town. Last month a geology professor brought rocks from DeGray and let us pass them around.

When Mother fell in her apartment, the pendant worked, the desk called me in four minutes, and Danielle rode with her to the hospital. I won't forget that.

We moved from a three-bedroom house to a garden cottage. We kept the dog and the tomato plants and lost the lawn mower.

Claire measured my mother's dining table and found the one apartment it would fit in. That's the kind of help I didn't know to ask for.

I came for the dining room and stayed for the porch. Somebody is always out there by four o'clock.