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 […]
A Mother’s Speech to Her Son, With Compliments to Kipling
I mentioned in a post in March that I was looking for the speech I gave at my son’s Eagle Scout ceremony. I’d found pictures of him at that event, but I didn’t know where the speech was. In another monumental cleaning project a couple of weeks ago, I found the speech! He was sixteen […]
Broken Bones: Which Ones Were They?
I’ve written before about the two times I broke my left foot (see here and here). Well, I broke another bone in that same foot many years earlier. During the winter of my 8th-grade year, I broke the fourth toe. The odd thing is that within a year, both of my parents broke that same […]
Not Wild About Wild Asparagus
The house we moved into when I was six and a half, in October 1962, was at the end of a block-long street. Next to us on the east was a vacant lot. That lot remained vacant until well after I no longer lived with my parents, though at some point the next block of […]
Relocation of Fort Kearny
In a post several years ago, I mentioned that Fort Kearny was relocated from near what is now Nebraska City, Nebraska, to a location further west along the Platte River. I described the surveying of the new fort site in Lead Me Home, and I’ve been revisiting that scene in my current work-in-progress. As migration […]
A Story I’ve Rarely Told: The A Minus Incident
I’ve mentioned before that I was one of several valedictorians of my high-school class. The six of us all had 4.0 GPAs. A 4.0 was as high as one could get in our high school—all A grades (A+, A, A-) counted as 4 points. There were no deviations for pluses and minuses, and there were […]
Mid-Continent Public Library ReadLOCAL Initiative
I wrote last week about National Library Week, and I announced that the Mid-Continent Public Library was now offering my books, Lead Me Home, and Now I’m Found. This week I want to tell you about the library’s new ReadLOCAL initiative, which MCPL announced last week. As I’ve written before, I’m a big proponent of […]
Falling In—Two Tales from Chesapeake Bay (or thereabouts)
I’ve written before about spring vacations our family took when our kids were small—how I struggled to find a church in which to celebrate Easter and how I had to hide the Easter candy from my children. One memorable trip over Easter was a week in Virginia when the children were in grade school. We […]