When Lightning Struck
A lot goes on in our family in May. Our daughter’s birthday. Mother’s Day. And, in years past, there was often a graduation or First Communion or Confirmation thrown in as well. My parents tried to visit in May to celebrate one or more of these occasions—they preferred May travel to February travel when our […]
The Story That Wrote Itself: An Epic Fail by Amazon
Every so often, something happens in real life that makes a good story. There is plot, there is conflict, there are characters. That happened to me last week. The characters were my daughter, her brother, and me. The conflict will be revealed if you read this post. I’ve mentioned before that my daughter’s birthday is […]
An Ongoing Search for My Mother
I’ve written before that I spent the first thirty years of my life trying not to be like my mother, and the next thirty realizing how much we were alike. And now that I’m over sixty? I’m trying to find my mother, who died when I was fifty-eight. Mother and I never were very close. […]
A Tale of Two Trunks
When I went away to college at age seventeen, I took my mother’s college trunk with me. She had been given the trunk when she went to college in 1951. When she gave it to me in 1973, it had sat in the unfinished part of the basement in my parents’ house ever since I […]
Treasures and Trash: Down Memory Lane
In our decluttering plan, I assigned my husband to clean the basement. Most of the things down there are his, so that made sense to me. Plus, the unfinished portion of our basement is known for harboring large spiders, and I have arachnophobia. He has been slow to get to this portion of his assignment, […]
Recipe: “Easy” Lemon Chicken
A couple of months ago, I thumbed through the recipe box my mother gave me before I was married. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but what I found was her recipe for Easy Lemon Chicken. This wasn’t a recipe from my childhood, and I don’t know where my mother got it. As […]
A Story I’m Glad I Told: My PG&E Stock
Tomorrow would have been my father’s 86th birthday, so I have been thinking about him. One story came to mind recently, a story I told him on my last visit with him, just a few weeks before he died. Here’s the background: When I got married in November 1977, as a wedding present, my parents […]
More on Slow Communications in the Frontier Days
As I work on my current novel, I am mired again in the vagaries of the mail system in 1850-51. I wrote a post on this topic when I was working on Now I’m Found, in which letters between the characters provided many of the plot’s turning points. In my current novel, two sisters write […]
Oversharing on Social Media: Where Do You Land?
I have family and friends who span the spectrum in their usage of social media. Some people post several times a day, while others refuse even to have a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter account. They might deign to have a LinkedIn account, but only because their professional contacts demand it. As for me, I’m […]
We Are Wired!
In the last few weeks, the house we are building has seen a lot of activity. As a result, there is now a lock on the door, which my husband and I discovered one Sunday when we went to inspect. It took a flurry of phone calls to get the code so we could go […]