Atomic Baby
I deliberately keep this blog apolitical, and this post is not meant to be political. Yet recent events have made me remember the Cold War era and have made me as uneasy about the possibility of nuclear war as I have been since I was a child. I was a child of the atomic age. […]
Why Were the Pioneers’ Wagon Wheels So Large?
I have researched how and where the emigrants traveled along the Oregon Trail for ten years, and I’m still learning. Recently, I learned from an article in The Wall Street Journal about why the wheel is round. The article contained the sentence: “The difficulty of moving a wheeled object increases to the point of impossibility […]
Pixels and PEBKAC
My husband and I recently began having cell phone problems. My phone was almost three years old, and its storage capacity was exhausted. I periodically had to delete apps and empty caches and the like so I could download my email. I couldn’t take more than a few pictures before I needed to offload them […]
My Earliest Thanksgiving Memories
I’ve written before (see here and here) about how glad I am that my children spent so much time with their cousins growing up, because I didn’t have that experience as a kid. But I do remember one Thanksgiving my family spent with my cousins. It’s the earliest Thanksgiving I remember—1958, when I was two-and-a-half years […]
Grandpa’s Stories Still Sustain Us
I’ve spent most of my Thanksgivings since 1979 with my in-laws, and most of those in their home. Occasionally, I prepared the Thanksgiving dinner at our house (typically with my father’s help, when he visited) and my in-laws joined us. But most of the time, we had our holiday meal in Marshall, Missouri. My mother-in-law […]
Little Brother as Mother’s Escort
My husband and I will celebrate our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary soon. We were married just days after my youngest brother turned ten. His role during our wedding was to escort my mother into the church. He wore a tuxedo and looked so cute, as little boys usually do when they wash up, comb their hair, […]
Writing Memoir: From Zero to Sixty in Half a Day
Although many posts on this blog are about my life, I don’t aspire to write a memoir. I’m interested in my life, but I don’t know how many other people would be. I might be able to tell amusing anecdotes, but I doubt I’d be able to develop an overall arc to my life—at least […]
First Wedding Present: Mixing Bowls
Sometime during the summer between our first and second years of law school, my husband-to-be and I decided to get married. We set the date for Thanksgiving weekend that autumn, back in my home town of Richland, Washington. Then we went about our graduate-student lives—going to classes, working on law review (me) and an international […]
The Rest of the Part-Time Story
A few months ago I wrote a post about my father telling me I should take “a nice part-time job” and how angry that made me. This post is a confession—I asked for that advice. Well, not for that advice specifically, but for any advice he could give me during a very difficult period in […]
Guest Post on A Writer of History
Last Thursday I had a guest post over on A Writer of History, which is an excellent blog on historical fiction written by M.K. Tod. I wrote about how I chose the time and place for my novels, Lead Me Home and Now I’m Found. A Writer of History has a lot to offer both […]