Memorial Day Means More as I Age
As I reviewed old posts, I realized I haven’t written much about Memorial Day. That’s because it was never a big occasion in my family growing up. We were new transplants to Richland, Washington, and didn’t have old relatives buried in the local cemetery. My grandparents were also the first generation in the family to […]
Oregon History: On Cattle Men and Government
I’ve written before (see here and here) about Jesse Applegate, who was part of the Great Migration of 1843. Jesse Applegate had the distinction of leading the “Cow Column” on the first large wagon train to Oregon. Several thousand head of cattle accompanied the wagons and emigrants of the Cow Column. The pioneers had separated […]
The Lemon Juice Incident
I wrote a previous post about an unfortunate situation involving orange juice. There is an earlier incident in my marriage involving lemon juice. Forty years ago, in the summer of 1978, my husband and I both had clerkships (what law students call internships) in Los Angeles. We had been married just a few months, and […]
A Story I Don’t Want To Tell: Piercing My Ears (for National Piercing Day)
I’ve been meaning to write the story of how I came to pierce my ears, though even thinking about it makes me squeamish. I recently learned that May 16 is National Piercing Day, so I have no excuse for further procrastination. It’s time to ’fess up. During the summer I was seventeen, after I graduated […]
Recipe — Hot Fudge Cake and Icing (aka the Nadine Spanner Chocolate Cake)
My daughter came home for her birthday last week, and it was a delight to have her visit. But that meant my husband and I had to make a birthday cake. I’ve mentioned the decadent Nadine Spanner Chocolate Cake in an earlier post. It is the “go to” cake in our family when we’re willing […]
A Treasure: My Daughter’s First Graduation Photo
I mentioned last year that I found many “treasures” when I cleaned out some cupboards. Here is one of them—my daughter’s preschool graduation photo from May 1990. Her preschool was part of a Catholic parochial school. She started at the “early childhood learning center” (as the preschool was formally called) when she was three months […]
Spring Has Finally Sprung
March and April this year were dreadful months—cold and dreary. Even if we had an occasional nice day during the week, the weekends were dank and gray. We’d had little snow through the winter, so to make up Mother Nature dumped storms on us, first one on Easter (April Fool’s!), and then another a week […]
A Story I’ve Rarely Told Before: My First Bad Haircut
I’ve written before about my dislike of beauty parlors, which dates back to early childhood. I have never been comfortable in salons, even though most of the time the stylists gave me better haircuts than when my mother cut my hair at home. However, a couple of weeks ago I got the worst haircut of […]
Party Like It’s 1843: Celebrating the 175th Anniversary of the Great Migration to Oregon
I’ve written before about the Great Migration of 1843—the first large wagon train along the Oregon Trail. This was the first organized company to take wagons to Oregon from Missouri. That year, over 700 people set out for Oregon, transported in more than 100 wagons. Men like Jesse Applegate, Peter Burnett, Philip Foster, William Livingston […]
Milestone: Deleting My Father’s Email
Today, April 25, 2018, would have been my father’s 85th birthday. (He was 52 days younger than my mother, so her 85th birthday passed several weeks ago.) He died on January 5, 2015, and we held his memorial service on April 25, 2015—three years ago today, on what would have been his 82nd birthday. I […]