A Story for Mutts Day: Meeting of the Minds
Today, July 31, is Mutts Day. I saw this reference on one of the many “national day” sites, and decided to believe it, even though there is no reference to how the day originated. My husband and I have only owned mutts since we’ve been married. First there was Rickover, whose mother was a Brittany […]
Postage Costs in the 1840s
I wrote a post last year about the difficulties of mail service during the California Gold Rush years. I was thinking about this issue again recently when I bought first-class stamps at our local Post Office. I typically wait until I’m almost out of stamps (which I was last week), then I buy 100 stamps. […]
Amelia Earhart Day: Memories of Atchison, Kansas
July 24 is Amelia Earhart Day. The news recently has been full of speculation about her disappearance, because of a History Channel show suggesting that a photo might have shown her and her navigator Frank Noonan with the Japanese in the Marshall Islands after her disappearance on July 2, 1937. However, Japanese archivists found the […]
Lessons from My First Writing Conference
I started my life as a writer in early 2007, so I’ve now been trying to develop my skills at writing fiction and creative nonfiction for a little more than a decade. I recently pulled out my journal volume from ten years ago, wanting to get a sense of how my writing life has changed […]
Discovering Jane Austen
Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817, two hundred years ago tomorrow. I first encountered her novels in the spring of 1970, when I was in the ninth grade and cooped up at home with the mumps. I didn’t have a bad case of the mumps, and I felt pretty healthy. But I couldn’t return […]
Random Photo: St. Louis, 1989, Our First Family Vacation
In the summer of 1989, when our daughter was four and our son seven, we took our first “real” family vacation. By that I mean, it was just my husband, me and the two kids, and we went somewhere other than to visit grandparents. We’d taken our son on a couple of trips before daughter […]
Fortieth Anniversary of a Speeding Ticket
I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that this year my husband and I celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary. We started dating in March 1977 and were married that November. We were apart for most of the summer of 1977, each working in different locations after our first year of law school. But he came to visit […]
Different Forms of Grieving
I did not plan to write this week about losing my parents—that’s a subject I’ve covered many times in this blog (see here and here for examples). But this week is the third anniversary of my mother’s death, and the topic is on my mind. Three years sounds like a long time. I’ve published two […]
The Bahamas: On Slavery, Service, Dependence, and Independence
I wrote last week about the recent vacation my husband and I took to the Bahamas. That post focused on the beauty of ocean and beach and on all the things we saw and did. Today I am writing about what I learned from Bahamian history and art. Because that nation’s history and art developed […]
Did the Oregon Trail Emigrants Really Circle Their Wagons?
Although pioneer journals often mention “circling the wagons,” it is not at all certain that all wagon trains pulled their wagons into a circle for the night, nor which of their possessions they protected inside those circles if they used them. One commentator has pointed out the logistical difficulties with placing everything within a wagon […]