My mother was an imaginative cook. At least that’s how we framed it in her eulogy.

The thing is, though, she was not a very good cook. Invariably she would not have all the ingredients required for whatever she was attempting to prepare. Since she didn’t drive she could not run out to the store at a moment’s notice to get what she needed. A neighbor might have had what she wanted, but I don’t remember her ever borrowing from a neighbor.

“I didn’t have lemons,” she would say as she set some dish down on the table, “so I used vanilla. I think it will be okay.”

We could never understand her method for choosing the substitute ingredients. Similarity of taste seemed to have nothing to do with it. I had a theory that it was bulk. Whatever would fill up the space in the same way as the missing ingredient was what she used. Or it may have been more random – whatever she laid her eyes on first. She did always replace solids with solids and liquids with liquids, so there was that.

And, no, it was never okay. It was weird. You can’t use vanilla instead of lemon in a sauce for chicken. Or peanut butter where cream cheese is called for. Or sprinkle raisins on green beans because you don’t have slivered almonds.

I wish I could say some of it tasted good. But it rarely did, and on occasion we would all come down with queasy stomachs. Or worse.

When she died, my brothers and sister and I tried to put together an appropriate and loving eulogy to present at the memorial service. Everyone who knew her was aware that she was a little scattered in her housekeeping efforts so we felt we had to address it in some way. We thought the food stories would be fun, but we didn’t want to sound negative. Hence the endearing title of imaginative cook. There were a few snickers from close relatives in the know, but for the most part people just nodded and smiled.

I did learn from her. By the time I had to put on an apron and headed for the kitchen I had learned something important. Something that has served me well for the rest of my life. And this is what I learned: Try to plan ahead a little.

Norma Libman is a journalist and lecturer who has been collecting women’s stories for more than twenty years. You can read the first chapter of her award-winning book, Lonely River Village, at NormaLibman.com.

Here is something I haven’t seen in awhile – sunshine. The sky has been layered in ashy gray light for the whole month of January. Today, though, the sun pours over the snow and turns it white and shiny. Long, inky shadows from the trees criss-cross this canvas like lines of calligraphy. A soft breeze lifts puffs of snow off the roof tops and scatters it across the land. The sun pierces the icicles dangling from the branches and lights them from the inside out. This is the light that flows through my window and across the pages of my notebook.

Many of my friends don’t like snow. They fly down to Florida and gather in trailer-pod parks for the winter. I appreciate how the balmy, perfumed ocean breezes, powdery beaches, and tropical water serve as a tonic for a frozen soul, but its a little too crowded for me. The state is a hodgepodge of strip malls, amusement parks, congealed highways, chain restaurants and hospitals and instant care centers wrapped in a gorgeous coast line. Its a little too flat and congested for me, a crowded and cluttered foreground beneath a vast, empty sky. I prefer the contoured, gently rolling hills covered with evergreens, corn-stubbled fields, fresh water ponds and lakes scrimmed with ice and cattails, and skies filled with purple-bottomed snow clouds. I crave the clean, metallic smell of the air and the silence that blankets the the forest trails I walk on. I love to visit Florida, but if I stay too long, the inland breezes don’t quite cover the smell of gasoline and car exhaust, or the moldy aroma of decay.

Here is my advice for surviving a northern winter: do not go gently into this good season. Do not let it push you back inside. Do not let the silent weight of the arctic cold tether you to the stale breath of the furnace. Instead, go out into the teeth of the season. Let the wind tear your cheeks. Let the cold numb your fingers and burn your toes. Let the icy pellets sting your eyes. Climb the frozen waves along Lake Michigan and spit back at the snow clouds scudding through the sky. Rage, rage at the fury of winter’s might. Stand at the edge of the freezing dark and wring the pleasures from its dying light.

Scott Peterson is from the cold North of Kalamazoo, Michigan

E S S A Y  What did I expect, taking the Ferry from Sausalito on Halloween? Hell, I was raised in San Francisco and have watched the City by the Bay bloat into a mecca for startups in a modern day version of the 1848 Gold Rush

Still, I couldn’t help being surprised by tumescent penises and leather-clad slaves in chains being goaded down Market Street by whip-wielding masters — much to the amusement of scores of young entrepreneurs snapping pictures with their cellphones.

Reaching First Street, I started to veer around a clutch of pedestrians, several of whom had stopped to take selfies, while other pedestrians gawked and laughed at someone moving down the crowded sidewalk toward us.

Then I saw her and knew immediately it was no Halloween costume the woman was wearing. Her blouse was torn, her skirt dirty, and her shoes scuffed and muddy. The middle-aged woman wasn’t mocking the homeless. She was one.

As she passed, I saw what she couldn’t, and what had drawn everyone’s attention and derision —- a strip of toilet paper at least twenty feet long was being trailed behind her.

She seemed unaware of the attention she was drawing, for she walked straight ahead, neither looking left or right, but continuing down the crowded sidewalk, with the spool of toilet paper following.

Not one person stepped forward to tell her. Everyone merely continued watching as she meandered through the lunchtime crowd.

“What happened to dignity?” I wanted to shout. Instead, I followed the woman toward the corner, and when she stopped for the traffic light at New Montgomery, I walked quietly up behind her so as not to frighten her and stepped on the square of toilet paper dangling from the bottom of her dress.

The light changed and she started across the street, with my shoe breaking the white trail of toilet paper no one wished to bring to her attention. At least she was no longer a spectacle; I thought, then turned back to the crowd and was unable to find a pair of eyes to meet my own. Everyone had gone back inside today’s version of the ostrich with its head in the sand: the ubiquitous handheld screen.

Call me a dinosaur, but at least I lived my life on the earth and not inside a simulacrum of it. I retained a few essential things from the mist of the past: there is no app for empathy; and dignity is a given for anytime two people appear to reach other. Or at least used to be.

Besides, all of us are trailing something, aren’t we?

Stewart Lindh is from Sausalito, California

E  S  S  A  Y   Or not.

Boomers are not sleeping like we used to and people who study this kind of thing can prove it. No less an authority on health than the National Institutes of Health is telling us that older adults typically have more trouble falling asleep.

No kidding. In their study of adults over 65, 13 percent of men and 36 percent of women take more than 30 minutes to fall asleep. On top of that, we sleep less deeply and wake up more frequently during the night. This change in our sleep patterns is mostly due to a lowered secretion of melatonin, the hormone that promotes sleep.

How about the fact that we have a lot on our minds? Yes. Experts agree that boomers have cares that are both upstream and downstream. They worry about their children and grandchildren as well as their elderly parents. Then there are the financial issues. Did we save enough for retirement? Will we be living in a van?

So this is not the new normal. If we’re not sleeping well, we need to do something about it. The mattress companies would have you believe that the solution is a new mattress and foundation (that’s what they’re calling boxsprings these days). And that could help, but experts think that getting more exercise is effective along with meditation and getting outdoors more often. So start doing something more aerobic such as brisk walking or swimming and get out and commune with nature before you run down to the mattress store where you will be tortured to find 107 kinds of mattress choices that totally baffle you. Consistency when it comes to your bedtime schedule is also supposed to help according to insomnia experts. Your bed should be in cool, dark and quiet space and it helps even more if you can create some kind of ritual that puts your mind in a restful state. To which I say, easier said than done when it comes to achieving a restful state of mind these days, but worth the effort to try.

If none of these suggestions help, it may be time to talk to your doctor or head to the sleep clinic to see if there’s a medical issue that’s affecting your sleep. There are effective treatments out there and seeking them out is a lot healthier than ignoring the problem.

So if you’re experiencing a lack of sleep that should be a wake-up call. I bet the experts never use that one.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

E  S  S  A  Y   I’m riding with Jim, my new sales rep in upstate New York. We’re going over to meet with Larry, the senior purchasing agent at the Bausch and Lomb Company in Rochester.

“We have to take him out to lunch,” Jim says. “I always take him out to lunch. He gives me valuable information on pricing and new product launches. He tells me what the competitors are up to.”

“OK,” I shrug. But I’m not much in the mood for entertaining today. Over the years, I’ve found that wining and dining purchasing agents is a particularly big waste of time. I’ve found them to be, as a group, either lugubriously boring and tediously lackluster people, or all smiles and chatteringly chipper like a pack of demented squirrels.

Larry is no exception. He’s short, slow-moving, and stocky with close-cropped hair and thick-lensed glasses. Over lunch he swills down, without a whole lot of ceremony, two vodkas-on-the-rocks and three red wines, which is a lot when you’ve got to go back to work.

But what really gets my goat is his habit of repeating himself over and over again. I probably wouldn’t mind it so much if he had anything useful or interesting to say, but he doesn’t. Everything he says is just so damned boring, a continuous rambling stream of useless, nonsensical blathering.

To make matters worse, to add to the unbearableness of it all, I can hardly hear him. He speaks in a soft, inaudible monotone. He’s practically whispering. It’s maddening, him droning on and drinking, drinking and droning on, and on and on.

What is this guy talking about? Why am I here? And what the hell is he doing in a job like this, a job of decision-making and dealing with vendors and customers? I’m annoyed with Jim, too, for getting us into this stupid situation. I want to get it over with and get back to work. I’m glaring at Jim. Jesus, this is like being at the dentist.

Then Larry, for no particular reason I can determine, blurts out that his birthday is Saturday; he’s turning 44. I notice his college ring, 1970, the same year I graduated college. But I’m only 42. Where did those extra two years of his go? Suddenly, a light goes on in my thick, foolish, insensitive head. I understand his mindless meanderings.

“So Larry,” I say, “You’ve been to Vietnam.”

Jim’s mouth drops open. “How could you possibly know that?”

But Larry peers quietly over his thick glasses at me for a long time. Then he smiles a soft, easy smile, rubs his wrinkled forehead hard and says, “I was in the Iron Triangle the winter of ‘66.”

I order another drink for him, and one for myself, too.

Michael Estabrook lives in Acton, MA.