Sleepless in Kansas City
One of the disadvantages I’ve found in getting older is not sleeping as well as I did in my youth. Ever since childhood, I’ve had trouble sleeping during times of stress, but now I hardly ever sleep for eight hours straight. Most nights I wake up once, but some nights I can’t fall asleep, and […]
On Pillboxes and Parents
One of the things I found as I went through my parents’ memorabilia recently was a little white pillbox made of stone. I had a matching blue pillbox already on my dresser. It wasn’t until I saw the white one that I remembered—my mother gave me the blue version many years ago. It has sat […]
Thoughts on Random Photos of the Absaroka Range
In the summer of 2015, when my sister and I went through family memorabilia from our parents’ house, we did a rough sort of our dad’s photographs. We threw the envelopes of negatives and prints into three piles—one for me, one for her, and one for our brother—based on whose family was most featured on […]
Another Treasure: “Brought a Girl Home to Mother”
My last post contained some pictures I found as “treasures” from my cleaning projects. This post is about another treasure—a postcard my husband sent his great-aunt after our first trip together to Missouri, my first trip ever to Missouri. I’ve written about this visit before, the first time I met my future in-laws—in early June […]
Puppies! (Historical Puppies, Not New Ones)
I’ve mentioned that I found some treasures during a couple of cleaning projects I undertook recently (see here and here). And I’ve written about the two puppies that my family acquired over Memorial Day weekend in 1997 (see here and here). (Someday I’ll post the story of how they were named.) One of the treasures […]
Schools in Oregon in the 1840s
In my novel Now I’m Found, Jenny, one of the lead characters in the book, opens a school for some of the children on surrounding farms. She holds the school in her cabin. It’s a one-room cabin, and she has benches built for the children to sit on. Her only resources are two primers, three […]
Musings on Time in the Twenty-First Century . . . and Before
As of the end of May, we’ve spent 209 months in the 21st Century (I started my count in January 2000). So at the end of this month, we will be 17.4% into our new century. If time were the plot to a novel, we’d be almost finished with the first act and moving into the […]
Working Across Time and Across Generations
My husband and I recently were fortunate to have visits from our two adult children. Our son came for a few days at the end of April, and our daughter was here over Mother’s Day. I remember my mother telling me one time how nice it was to have her children visit by themselves, without […]
Lessons from the 2017 OWFI Conference
I attended the 2017 Oklahoma Writers Federation Inc. conference in Oklahoma City from May 4-6 this year. I’ve attended this conference in the past (though the last time was in 2014), and I always learn something. This year, I probably spent about two-thirds of my time in marketing sessions, with the rest devoted to aspects […]
A Mother-Daughter Brunch and Fashion Show
My daughter went to an all-girls high school. One of my favorite events of the year was the mother-daughter brunch held each spring. After the meal at a hotel downtown, the senior class put on a fashion show, with the styles selected from several major retailers in our area. Each clothing store offered a different […]