Growing With Our Grandchildren

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Hello, friends, Shirley Showalter here, co-author with Marilyn McEntyre of The Mindful Grandparent: The Art of Loving Our Children's Children, from Broadleaf Books, May, 2022. Having embraced elderhood, we invite you to do the same.

In 2013 I published Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World. Previously, I was a professor, a college president (Goshen College), and a foundation executive (the Fetzer Institute).

Most recent blog posts

The Harvest Comes For You and For Me

Here is a poem fragment I think of every fall. “Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the…

So Much Fun: Making Collage Photos and Getting Chills

A few weeks ago everyone seemed to be playing with FaceApp, which aged faces of young people. You could see yourself in the future, say, fifty years from now. On our second honeymoon to Nova Scotia, we did the reverse.   These collages were much fun to make. They were taken almost exactly fifty years…

The Three Most Important Words in Marriage: Fifty Years of Learning Together

It’s a family joke with us. We picked it up from a friend who asked, “What are the three most important words in marriage?” Our immediate response was “I love you.” We say those words to each other every day. We’ve been doing so for more than 50 years. But our friend said, “No, there…