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 […]
Libraries Transform—Celebrate National Library Week, April 9-15, 2017
This week, April 9-15, 2017, is National Library Week. It’s a time to celebrate libraries and library workers and to promote library use and support. According to the American Library Association website, the theme for National Library Week this year is “Libraries Transform.” I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for public libraries. […]
A Tale of Two New Computers
I wrote in January 2013 about having to replace two computers and an e-reader within a few short months. Four-and-a-half years later, I’m in a similar situation. After replacing my husband’s and my cell phones last December and our printer in February, I am now in the middle of upgrading our two computers. The keyboard and […]
On Birthdays and Memory
Sixty years ago today was my first birthday. I was too young to remember it, but there is a fuzzy photograph of me in a high chair with a cake bearing one candle in front of me. I was the oldest grandchild on my mother’s side of the family, so I’m certain my first birthday […]