First Birthdays With My Husband
My husband-to-be and I started dating about a month before my twenty-first birthday. We were first-year law students at the time. When my big day rolled around, he gave me flowers and took me out for a really nice dinner in downtown Palo Alto, California. (We were law students. Any dinner in a restaurant with […]
An Empty InBox
Many years ago, my department at work took the Gallup StrengthsFinder survey to find out what we were best at, as defined by Gallup. At the top of my list was “Input.” That sounded odd to me, but the description of this strength said it meant I liked to collect things. I’ve never had a […]
Cloisters: Transplanting History Across the Seas and Through the Centuries
My son says that when he lived in New York several years ago I told him I wanted to see the Cloisters when I visited him. I don’t remember that conversation, though he has a better memory than I do. In any event, we did not make it to the Cloisters when he lived there […]
Party Like It’s 1850
The main plot and some of the sub-plots of my work-in-progress revolve around relationships between the sexes. I try to be faithful to the attitudes of people of the mid-19th century in my book, even though modern readers are often put off by how formal people were compared to our own times. My characters come […]
Telling History Through Family Stories: The Tenement Museum
My husband and I recently spent time with our son and his girlfriend in New York. They took us to see the Tenement Museum in Manhattan, which explains what life was like at various points in time in a tenement building at 97 Orchard Street on the lower East Side. This tenement was built in […]
Bonsai Tree: A Lesson in History
One day during my recent visit to New York, my friend and I walked through the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Early March is not the best time to see this Botanical Garden. The day was cold, and the wind blew. Most of the trees and plants were dead or dormant. The only blooms we saw outside […]
The Perfect Pi Day (3-14-16) and the Difficulty of Acting Imperfectly
There is nothing connecting the two topics of this post—Pi Day and deliberately bad acting—except that I noticed them on the same day recently. I was in New York City spending time with a friend. We were in Manhattan to see two shows. Both were comedies, and we laughed uproariously. In between the shows, we […]
Nursery School: Singing in the Rain
The Willamette Valley is wet. That’s what I remember most about the winters when we lived in Corvallis, Oregon, between 1959 and 1961. As I am writing my current work-in-progress, I find it easy to write about winters on homesteads near Oregon City—I just think of my preschool days. Wet. Dark. Depressing. It isn’t a […]
Fear of Drilling? You Betcha
As I sat in the dentist’s office a couple of weeks ago waiting for the anesthetic to take hold, I worked on a crossword puzzle. The clue for one of the longer words in the puzzle was “Fear associated with drilling.” The answer was not apparent to me. I worked around the word, and soon […]
My Mother’s Last Doll
I’ve written before about my first doll. I’ve written about my mother’s Storybook Bride doll that I could never play with. And I’ve written about the sewing doll that my grandmother and I made clothes for. This post is about my mother’s last doll. It wasn’t really a doll. It was a knitted humanoid figure […]