O Christmas Tree . . . and Keepsakes Ornaments
My husband and I are fans of live Christmas trees. Actually, I’d be tempted to have an artificial tree, but I love the evergreen scent of a real tree. So I put up with the messy needles every year. For the past several years, we’ve purchased Fraser firs, an evergreen native to the Appalachian region. […]
Back to Square One: My New Work in Progress and Scrivener
After I published Now I’m Found in late September 2016, I found myself at loose ends with my writing. I still had to draft regular posts for this blog and for another blog I author, but for the first time in ten years, I didn’t have a novel that I was in the process of […]
On Rocking Horses, Reading About Horses, and Real Horses
I’ve posted about my first Christmas before. Someone in the family—my father or grandfather—was good enough to take a picture of all the presents I received from Santa Claus before I was awake to see them. (Not that, at eight months, I could have done too much damage to them.) Many of those first Christmas […]
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 […]