Anniversary in Aruba
For our 25th wedding anniversary in 2002, my husband and I went to Aruba. First, we celebrated Thanksgiving at home with our two children—I think that was the only year we have ever had just the four of us for a holiday. We cooked turkey and all the trimmings, and at the end of that […]
Recipe: Old-Fashioned Green Beans
A staple recipe in our household is Old-Fashioned Green Beans. They’re easy to make, and the recipe doubles easily so it can feed a crowd. My husband and I often take these beans to potlucks and other events where we are responsible for a side dish. We also serve them regularly at family meals. Despite […]
Our Fortieth Anniversary: Memories and Treasures Through Generations
This year I’ve posted several times about my husband’s and my courtship forty years ago. (See here and here and here.) Yesterday, November 26, 2017, was our fortieth wedding anniversary. As we did the year we were married, we celebrated throughout the Thanksgiving weekend. This Thursday we hosted my husband’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law for […]
How Did Emigrants in Oregon Celebrate Thanksgiving in the 1840s?
I wanted to write about Thanksgiving in Oregon in the 1840s, but didn’t find anything specifically on that topic. I did, however, find some interesting information about the development of the Thanksgiving holiday as we know it in the United States. See here, here, here, and here. From this history, I’ve extrapolated what I think […]
Random Photos: Thanksgiving 1988
Every so often I thumb through one of my boxes of old photographs. This time I kept thumbing until I found something suitable for a November blog post, so I suppose my choice isn’t really random at all. For this post, I selected an envelope of pictures my father took during a visit my parents […]
“When He’s Ten . . .” And Now He’s Fifty!
When our youngest sibling (a boy) was born, my ten-year-old brother announced in awe, “When he’s ten, I’ll be twenty!” As if it was impossible for him to consider ever being twenty, which it might well have been. My grandmother loved telling that anecdote, and she repeated it often over the years. Of course, she […]
A Belated Veterans Day Post
It seems that in over five years of writing this blog, I have never written about Veterans Day. This year, I am finally doing it, albeit a couple of days late. I never expected to be part of a military family. I didn’t have any veterans among my relatives. Neither of my grandfathers served during […]
The Baggage We Tote Around
In this phase of my life, I sometimes find that I am a bag lady. I often spend an entire day away from my house in meetings with other writers, in workshops and webinars, and in many other activities. For example, last Saturday, I attended a writing workshop from 9:00 am until 4:00 pm. And […]
The Power & Limits of Scrivener (for me)
As I try to polish and publish my third historical novel over the next couple of months, I thought it would be worthwhile to step back and take a look at the tools I’ve used in writing this draft, particularly Scrivener. I’m surprised that I haven’t written about Scrivener in almost a year. For nonwriters […]
A Halloween Story I’ve Never Told Before: Alone with the Wind
Every year on Halloween night, I remember Halloween night in 1963, when I was seven years old. Our family had just moved into a newly constructed house in a new neighborhood about a month earlier. I had my own bedroom for the first time in my life. My room was on the corner of the […]