One of my happiest early memories involves ‘fooling’ my mom. One day when I was 4 or 5, I was playing outside, and I heard my mother doing laundry in the basement. I crept up to the edge of the basement window, careful to stay out of sight, and began making plaintive kitten sounds. From the basement, I heard my mother say, “Oh! That sounds like a kitten outside! It must be very thirsty. I will get a saucer of milk and put it on the ground.” Delighted, I scurried to hide around the back of the house. I peeked around the corner in time to see my mother carefully placing a saucer of milk on the ground outside the basement window. She called, “Here, kitty, kitty!” a few times and then said, “Oh well. Maybe the kitten will return if I go back inside.” As soon as she left, I crept up to the window again. I tried to lap the milk from the saucer with my tongue as I’d seen cats do, but it turned out to be a lot harder than it looks! Finally, I gave up being a cat and picked up the...

  by Catherine Maven 2021 When I first met my new neighbor Mary, I thought she was a robot – like those women in Stepford Wives. Her hair was always perfect, as was her makeup and her clothes. Although her kids were the same age as mine – five and seven – her house was always spotless and uncluttered, whereas mine always looked like a bomb had gone off. I met her husband, Sam, once, briefly, but he was one of those quiet guys that you can’t really read, and I seldom saw him. My own husband had run off the previous spring, and now saw the kids for one point five days every other weekend. Whenever her kids came over to our house, they played like normal kids – running and screaming over nothing. They were careful to keep their clothes clean, though, and they did check with Mary for permission for everything, which I thought was weird. “Gemma asked if I wanted some juice. Is that okay?” they would enquire, like Stepford children. “Sure,” Mary would reply. “Just make sure to ...