I’ve often wondered why no support group existed for frustrated parents of live-in adult children who expect to hang around for as long as they please—no chores, no house rules, no move-out date or action plan. A group of these parents has been gathering here at my site, learning from one another’s stories. Now they’ve launched that much-needed support group, Enablers Anonymous.

There ought to be an award for a reader so tenacious, she’ll spend six weeks tracking down a copy of a book. Not a signed first edition of The Great Gatsby (dust jacket intact, every page pristine) but My Mother’s Daughter by one Rona Maynard, available online in paperback for $15.19. Now, you might think online bookstores exist to sell books to people who want to buy them and have gone so far as to type their credit card number in the handy little box. O ye of too much faith!

You can tell a lot about a book from the first sentence. Here’s the latest one that hooked me: “It was just the two of us, my mother and me, after my father left.” I knew I was about to read an honest-to-goodness story with characters on the brink of change they never dared imagine and a plot to keep me wondering, “What will happen next?” These old-fashioned pleasures, often shunted aside by fashionably minimalist fiction, are front and centre in my sister Joyce Maynard’s new novel Labor Day.

On a laden bookshelf at a country inn, I found an abandoned copy of Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. Heilbrun’s suicide at 77 had outraged many of her fans, but something compelled me to reach for this book. With a big birthday coming up, I wanted to learn from Heilbrun as she’d been before she lost hope and heart.

I get peevish about crowds, mud, stinky toilets and bad food, so I’ve never regretted missing out on the Woodstock festival. While half a million celebrants were camping out on Yasgur’s farm and getting their souls free, I was in staid Toronto, where I’d spent the summer cleaning houses inhabited by student riff-raff like me. Come to think of it, I got the stinky toilets. But I knew I’d missed something momentous.

My home city, Toronto, prides itself on gastonomic flair. But where are the inventive omelets? The tantalizing updates on corned beef hash? The tofu scrambles so tasty, you don’t miss eggs? I live downtown and I’ve come up dry. In Burlington, Vermont, it’s a vastly more flavourful story.

Although I’ll happily admit to being over 55, I never think of my age as a defining part of my identity. Still, when Fifty-Five Plus magazine suggested a cover profile of me, I was not about to say no. Especially since I knew the writer, Jenefer Curtis, who wrote for me at Chatelaine and is one of my readers here at ronamaynard.com.

When I was a teenage misfit in a small New Hampshire town with no purveyors of guitars, French magazines or rawhide sandals like the ones worn by Biblical shepherds, I would save my allowance for escapes to the centre of all things hip and freewheelin…

If I must spend upwards of an hour in a doctor’s waiting room, I’m wise to bring a book. The other day I sat down there with Marilynne Robinson’s Home, a dense, meditative novel about guilt and forgiveness, shame and hope, the ache of absence and the unfulfilled promise of return in a family where too much has gone unsaid for too long.