On Heffalumps, Hookers, and Humor
Here’s a (sort of) Christmas story I’ve never posted before. I wrote it for a writers’ group holiday party a few years ago. I hope you enjoy it. On Heffalumps, Hookers, and Humor The winter when I was four, I wasn’t supposed to know how to read, but I did. When Mommy read me stories […]
My Parents’ Engagement Party
My parents were married in June 1955, after about seven years of dating—they’d met as high school freshmen and begun dating when they were sophomores. Their relationship survived the remainder of high school and four years at different colleges. Sixty-two years ago this month, in December 1954, during Christmas break of their senior year of […]
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 […]