There are echoes of Romeo and Juliet, but the ending is happier.

This story of forbidden love took place long ago on a Mediterranean island – 1870s Sicily, to be exact.

Elizabeth Lagudice was a beautiful noblewoman with dark curls and big eyes. Dona Elizabeth, as she was called, made a fabled mistake: She fell in love with a tailor.

Dr. Seuss’ fourth book was published in 1940 and met with critical acclaim. It features an elephant whose large ears and long trunk provided the ideal infrastructure for the artist’s distinct lumps and humps.

Today, the homely hero of “Horton Hatches The Egg” feels like a symbol of what we are sorely lacking in a culture that sets us up to be flighty and fickle. He reminds me of a Gospel principle I have found more challenging now that I’m a parent. 

"Synchronicity.”

That’s the word one journalist used in a Nov. 3 Instagram post to describe the fact that Election Day fell on the feast day of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of social justice. It was a timely reminder, he felt, to vote with those ideals in mind, to imagine the kind of world the 17th century Dominican lay brother was trying to bring about.

Can you come in?”

My grandma’s favorite question is one we now discourage her from uttering.

The impulse to swing open her door and her arms, honed over nine decades and stitched into her Irish-Catholic DNA, is not easily thwarted. Yet we have attempted to do so this year.

Paula Kraus wasn’t afraid to utter the wish burning on her heart, the one that seizes so many preparing to lose a loved one.

The color-coded books first caught my eye.

It’s become one of my favorite flourishes in interior design, one that always stops me in my Instagram scrolling. And here it was, on the cover of a book titled “Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday.” Four built-in shelves held coordinating books: reds, whites, greens and blacks. From there, my eye wandered to the massive stone fireplace with a Blessed Mother icon above it and a crackling fire below. 

Fifteen years after Richard Louv’s bestseller “The Last Child in the Woods” was published, it is more relevant than ever. I’m fascinated by his insights on the “nature-deficit disorder” ailing kids.

Tonight I wrote two events on my calendar: a birthday party and a baptism. They will be sanitized, scaled-down gatherings — and they will be fun — but still, it pained me to sully those blank boxes with black ink.

The nurses kept using the same word. The doctors used it too: Rock star.

It started with the Italians, whose arias rose from the balconies. They were on lockdown, but their voices rang out down empty moonlit streets. Ballads, the national anthem, improvised ditties over the barking of dogs.

Stephanie Weinert’s Instagram followers have come to expect unfiltered captions to go with her pretty pictures. That’s why she has amassed 7,000 followers, who click on images of her five young children and, in doing so, access her tips on skincare, home decor and liturgical living.

There comes a moment when something clicks. At a book club or a Bible study. In a carpool circle or a coffee shop. A connection is made, and a gathering turns into a group, taking on a life of its own.

 Elizabeth Tomlin has experienced it many times, and as a nomadic army wife, she’s come to rely on it.

The snow has begun. It is expected to last 18 hours, piling nine inches high and crippling weekend plans. The streets are emptying, the collective dash to the grocery store completed.

But here in our cul-de-sac, the party is about to begin.

I’m beginning the new year with a clean office. It seems a good place to start, a practical way to set me up for any other resolutions I make.

Robert May was painfully aware of the distance between his dreams and his reality.

The 34-year-old Dartmouth graduate had long fantasized about writing the great American novel. Instead, he was working a mediocre job as an ad man for Montgomery Ward, cranking out forgettable copy about silk sheets and white shirts. He lived in a tiny apartment with his ill wife and young daughter.