Christina Capecchi

When Violet Jessop set out to be a maritime stewardess, she wasn’t driven by some starry-eyed desire to see the world. She was moved by necessity.

My grandma’s favorite question is one we now discourage her from uttering. “Can you come in?”  The impulse to swing open her door and her arms, honed over nine decades and stitched into her Irish-Catholic DNA, is not easily thwarted. Yet we have attempted to do so this year.

Tonight I wrote two events on my calendar: a birthday party and a baptism. They will be sanitized, scaled-down gatherings – and they will be fun – but still, it pained me to sully those blank boxes with black ink. 

The snow has begun. It is expected to last 18 hours, piling nine inches high and crippling weekend plans. The streets are emptying, the collective dash to the grocery store completed.