Virginia Buckingham

Lest I be accused of being obsessed with fire, let me share that one of us eight Buckingham siblings once played with matches and lit a neighbor’s yard on fire and subsequently ran away from home. That sibling was not me! But if not obsessed, I am indeed, let’s call it, enthralled. Last year around this time I wrote a column about embracing the onset of early darkness. Wearing it like a cozy blanket. My theory was that if my attitude was one of welcoming the opportunity to retreat and reflect, then these days of waning sunlight would not be something to get through, but something to cherish. As I often do, I found a book with a wise author’s words to support my approach. Katherine May’s “Wintering” offered a guide through. This year, I need an additional strategy and another ...

Initially, I planned to entitle this column “Don’t look away.” The topic is the toll of consuming news during these painful times in the country and the world. And the importance of staying informed, and bearing witness.   I still believe those things are important. I also have come to understand that taking a break from doing so preserves our energy to engage at all. I’m a daily newspaper reader and have noted in the past that Twitter (or that platform now known as X) was a handy news aggregator for me. It seems less so now — more clickbait than content. I still check the world’s goings-on there, it just takes more effort. TV news? That’s been hard to watch. During the pandemic, my daughter and I made a habit of watching Anderson Cooper on CNN every night. It fed our need t...

I recently saw a headline about a new study that showed that running as little as two miles three times a week could extend your life. That seems doable, I thought, until I asked my knees, who immediately protested that it was not doable at all (you idiot, they added!). Thus, I’ll stick with the original guidance I’ve tried to follow in recent years that a regular walking routine is the key to a healthy aging body. Yet, I am reaching that age where the health of my mind is increasingly on my mind at least as much as my mobility. What to do for that?On Instagram, Maria Shriver offers weekly brain teasers — three people walk into a bar and seven people are related to two of them, tell us why, or something like that. I haven’t spent time trying to crack them because just reading them makes m...