Month: October 2025

Pity the evil queen in Snow White asking the magic mirror who was the fairest of all, waiting anxiously for the reply. Today all the queen would need to do is upload an image of herself to an AI beauty analysis app and wait a few seconds for the results.

Beauty analysis apps score faces “plain, pretty or gorgeous,” or “attractive, average or sub.” One app scores hair, skin, jawline, cheekbones, nose, chin and lips on a scale of 1-10. Another app uses percentages to rank symmetry and proportion. Yet another uses percentage points to score images for confidence, fun, smartness, trustworthiness and approachability.

Who knew you could tell all that from a simple headshot?

Beauty apps tease users with the lure of self-improvement. After critiquing hair, skin and face, links to products that may help remedy flaws and shortcomings magically appear. How convenient. Such benevolence.

Of course, these beauty analysis apps are targeted toward young girls still maturing, still developing confidence, still getting comfortable in their own skin and changing bodies. Some of the apps require users to be age 16+, but the majority have no age restrictions whatsoever.

I have a vested interest in this phenomenon. Of our 11 grandchildren, nine are girls. Four of those nine girls are teens now. They are flourishing in a myriad of directions, creating, sewing, designing, discovering athletic abilities and cooking talents, devouring books, playing piano, banjo, guitar, fiddle and French horn.

The last thing any of them needs is a computer app scoring their faces.

Beauty analysis apps, designed to entice tweens and teens, are one eyelash extension shy of being online bullies. They prey on insecurities.

Maturity is a process that happens over the passing of time. For a young person still in the process, physical critiques can be devastating. You can work hard and improve your grade in a class at school, but there’s no way to improve a 4/10 score on your jaw line, change the spacing of your eyes or the shape of your mouth.

Why would we think a software app can define beauty based on preset points of size, shape and symmetry programmed into AI?

True beauty has an abstract quality that transcends the physical. Beauty encompasses essence, being and movement. Beauty shines through kindness, selflessness, heart, mind, spirit and soul.

Perhaps the best affirmation of beauty is knowing you are made in the image of God. That’s a powerful place to start and a wonderful foundation from which to build.

We accidentally left for our vacation in Maine a day early. I take full credit—or blame—it depends on who tells the story. There’s nothing wrong with leaving a day early, except that when you get there you won’t have a place to stay.

A quick online search landed us a reservation just outside a picturesque New England town we’d been to before, a charming spot with water, docks, boats, and giant lobsters painted on cafe windows.

Our reservation wasn’t actually in the picture postcard town, but somewhat nearby. As a crow flies. A crow with two broken wings and no brain for navigation.

I couldn’t find pictures of the place where I reserved a room, but when the car is loaded and you’re panicked you don’t waste time on details.

It was long after dark when GPS led us off a state highway and onto a blacktop side road. With no moon or streetlights, we popped the headlights on high, penetrating the thick black night with all the brilliance of a birthday candle.

We drove and drove, curve after winding curve, without a single vehicle coming in the opposite direction. Side roads had no signage. “Enter at your own risk” was understood.

The only sign of life we passed was a few trucks and half-dozen people in a clearing gathered around a fire blazing in a barrel. We didn’t stop to socialize.

Mile after mile, trees hemmed us in on both sides of the road. The forest was dense and ominous, the kind that terrorized Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel and Goldilocks.

We kept going. But to where?

I knew where. Deliverance.

I imagined our lodging would turn out to be some grizzled old coot’s ramshackle barn at the far back of his property. Amenities would include an outhouse with a creaky door, lots of flies and no toilet paper. Our sleeping quarters would be two filthy sleeping bags in a rickety hay loft where we would be killed in our sleep.

I shared these thoughts with my husband. Apparently, it’s not easy being married to someone with a vivid imagination.

The blacktop finally dumped us onto a road with other vehicles. GPS directed us down a steep drive that led to one of the most charming places ever. It was part hotel and part inn, like something out of the old Newhart sitcom. Thankfully, there was no sign of Larry, Darryl and Darryl.

The clerk was closing shop for the night but checked us in and mentioned a trail on the backside that led to chairs by the water for a black sky view.

We dumped our bags and headed down a long trail with a small flashlight while dodging goose poo every other step. At the water’s edge we plopped down in Adirondack chairs, looked up and fell silent.

I’d never seen so many layers and layers of stars.

I’d never seen millions of stars all sparkling, twinkling, appearing and disappearing. I’d never seen the Milky Way. I’d never seen that mysterious hazy band that looks like part fog and part cloud weaving among the stars and spiraling throughout the galaxy.

We sat amazed beneath a superdome of stars beyond the power of our comprehension and the capability of numbers.

We went to sleep that night in a comfortable bed in a clean room, giving thanks to the Creator for the wonder of creation, last-minute plans and the road less traveled.

 

Because I love, love, love saving time, I am looking forward to the first weekend in November when the entire nation will save 60 minutes—not the Sunday night news program but an hour on the clock.

Of course, nobody likes to mention the fact that the only reason we are “saving” an hour is because an hour was stolen from us in the spring. The second weekend in March is when 48 of the 50 states willingly consent to theft — to turn the clocks forward, have an hour taken from us, and try to trick our bodies, metabolisms, sleep cycles, plants, animals and small children into believing it is one time when everyone knows it is another.

Fall is when we set the record, or the time on the clock, straight. We gain back the hour that was stolen.

Justice.

The question is, what to do with the hour we gain?

My first instinct is to go to the gym. That is quickly cancelled by my second instinct, which is to celebrate and make a coffee cake. Then maybe I can go to the gym. If there is time.

Or maybe we can redeem the extra hour at the end of the day and have dinner twice.

Why do all my time-saving ideas have to do with food? They call it comfort food for a reason. I am comforted that my stolen hour has been returned.

Here, have some coffeecake.

I’ve tried reporting the stolen hour in spring as a theft and people laugh. Guess who’s laughing now? And enjoying her extra 60 minutes. If it wasn’t stolen, why are they returning it?

Most of our clocks are digital and will reset themselves while we sleep, but a handful will not.

The clock in our bathroom must be reset manually. If you-know-who resets it late Sunday afternoon and doesn’t tell me, I have a moment of panic wondering why I’m going to bed early. Am I sick? I don’t feel sick.

If I wake up, look at the time on my phone and see it doesn’t match the time on the bathroom clock, I have another moment of self-doubt. Am I in in the twilight zone? More importantly, do they observe daylight saving time in the twilight zone?

A small battery-operated clock on my desk needs to be reset manually, which I will forget to do for weeks. One day down the road, I will look at it, panic, scramble, and rush off for some appointment an hour early.

There was some rumbling about curtailing daylight saving time last year, but that’s all it was — noise. All this back and forth, sleeping, not sleeping, switching up schedules for babies and small children, is exactly why we shouldn’t mess with Father Time. There’s a reason the old guy looks grumpy. He knew what we were about to do.

They say birds of a feather flock together and while that may be true most of the time, I have proof it is not true all the time. Our 12-year-old grandson and a jet-black Cayuga duck sitting beside him, with its long neck and head resting on the boy’s shoulder, have been flocking together for weeks.

The boy says it all began because the duck’s mother did not get moody. He actually said broody, but I thought he said moody, which made no sense because every mother is capable of moody.

Apparently, the momma duck did not experience a hormone surge prompting her to get all broody, fuss with the nest, sit on the egg and warn encroaching intruders by quacking and hissing.

The boy took the lonely pale gray egg with black markings inside the house and made a cozy nest for it in an incubator. He misted the egg with water at regular intervals, knowing the egg would have been damp from the mother duck returning from a swim in the pond.

Days passed, weeks passed and the egg began to crack. With a little help, the duckling hatched. When the duckling was big enough to fit in the boy’s cupped hands, he took it outside to a nest made with pine shavings. He tucked the duckling in the nest under a heat lamp, hoping his fowl friend would integrate with new feathered friends.

Didn’t happen. “The other ducks wanted nothing to do with him,” he says. The duck bobs wildly in agreement, quacks twice, and nibbles the boy’s ear lobe.

The duck did integrate eventually, but with the boy, not the other ducks. The new webbed-foot companion and constant shadow was named “Mr. Drake.”

“How did you know the duck was a him?”

“By his voice. He had a raspy voice. Only drakes have raspy voices.”

Mr. Drake takes four swift jabs at the boy’s neck.

“Does that hurt?” I ask.

“Not really,” he says with a grin.

Mr. Drake glares at me and lets out a nasty, angry quack.

Mr. Drake follows the boy whenever he comes outside. The boy walks up the hill; Mr. Drake walks up the hill. The boy pushes the raft into the pond; Mr. Drake pushes into the pond and swims alongside.

The boy shoves a kayak into the pond, climbs in and lifts Mr. Drake onto his lap. The two silently glide, sending waves gently rippling through the water. The green sheen on the duck’s neck shimmers in the dappled sunlight. The quiet is periodically pierced by a deep, throaty quack.

“Does Mr. Drake prefer the kayak over swimming alongside the raft?”

“I think so,” the boy says. “But a lot of times he jumps out of the kayak and swims alongside.”

“Does Mr. Drake ever, well, you know, in your lap?”

The boy just chuckles. There are some things you simply don’t tell Grandma.

And Grandma thanks you.