Virginia Buckingham

I'm not a student of numerology — the mystical belief in numbers having meaning beyond their, well, meaning. But when a friend told me recently that 2025, because its individual numbers add up to nine, is a year of completion, I found myself nodding — and Googling. In numerology, "the number nine holds a significant and powerful position. It symbolizes the idea of completion, though not necessarily finality. Instead, it signifies the conclusion of one phase, paving the way for the initiation of the next."…

I'm not a podcast listener, preferring quiet when going about my day, doing chores, walking or driving somewhere. My sarcastic older brother, a podcast host himself — about squash, the sport, not the vegetable — would say I prefer the voices in my head to voices in my ear and he's not far off. So when a friend mentioned a podcast she was enjoying, I nodded and promptly forgot about it. She brought it up again, specifically one episode that was helpful in reframing these…

Are you grateful for the bountiful blooms on the hydrangeas this year? Then, in part, thank last year's rainy July and August weekends. Like many, I've wondered why my hydrangea bushes are dripping with flowers and learned the cause was the previous summer's wet weather along with the mild winter. The combination of moist soil and moderate temperatures is promoting the prolific growth. I find it interesting that something we abhorred — rain on almost every summer weekend — is at least partly responsible for…

I had just about given up on Facebook. Most of the posts in my feed were ads for stuff I was not interested in. But I must have been interested in them at some point, searched or clicked on or paused on an image or video. And that behavior was fed into some big algorithm cruncher in the sky which resulted in ubiquitous ads for deck umbrellas (at one point I needed a new one), flattering swimsuit tops (always looking for those) and candles. Readers…

I was walking near my neighborhood on a recent sunny morning and saw three people standing stock still in the middle of the street, looking up. I followed their gaze. Was it a cool bird? That would get my immediate attention. Nope. So wide it was hanging over the street, nearly touching the branches reaching up on the other side of the road, was a tree. Its cone-shaped canopy was dotted with cone-shaped pink flowers. "Do you know what it is?" one of the gazers…

My dad bought me my first watch for a long-ago birthday. He picked it out of a plastic case which sat on the front counter at the local drug store, aptly named Drug City. The case spun around so you could look at all the choices, and he picked a Timex on a silver link chain that looked like a bracelet. I treasured it, mostly because my dad wasn't one to buy us presents; that was my mom's purview. I kept it for years after…

Readers of this column know I spend a lot of time thinking about how to bridge the political divide and bring people together. This past week I was presented with two sharply different approaches to that work. Or were they? First, Daniel Lubetsky, CEO of Kind Snacks, who has put action behind the work of fostering respectful disagreement and positive connection for years, gave a TED talk last week, a summary of which landed in my inbox. It echoed many themes I had heard him…