Siblings as Targets and as Friends
Both my mother and my father grew up in families consisting of two siblings—an older brother and younger sister. I’ve always wondered if that is part of why they were so compatible, although they each had an uneasy relationship with their sibling for much of their lives. I’ve written before about my mother and her […]
How the Great Fires Shaped Early San Francisco
The last survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake died earlier this month. William Del Monte was three months old when the earthquake struck and 109 when he died on January 11. Reading the news articles about his life and death brought to mind all the novels I’ve read about the earthquake and the fires […]
My Wool Dress from Garfinckel’s
Most people pull out their wool sweaters and socks for warmth during winter. Not me. I hate wearing wool. It makes my skin itch worse than mosquito bites. As a child, I mostly wore cotton—my grandfather kept us well-supplied with Carter’s clothes. My brother was allergic to wool. He had one lambswool sweater that made […]
Snow Days: A Recent Phenomenon
Maybe this is one of those “when I was young, we had it tough” stories. But when I was young, we didn’t have snow days. At least, I don’t remember my classes ever being canceled due to snow, nor for any weather-related events. It might have happened, but I don’t remember any such occasions. Hoping […]
Real Life Does Not Make Good Narrative
I’ve been reading Janet Burroway’s book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. I started it a few months back, and every so often I dip into it again. I’m not reading it linearly. I started with the chapters on character, then moved to theme and setting, and last week I read the first chapter […]
A Tale of Two Retirements
I retired nine years ago from my corporate job to become a writer. My husband retired from his law firm a little more than a year ago. So how is our retirement working out? As I intended, writing has been my primary activity for the past nine years. In the first six months after I […]
My 400th Post: On Planning, Flexibility, and Commitment in Blogging and in Life
To my surprise, this is my 400th post, which seems worthy of mention. I last wrote about blogging in any detail on my 250th post, on July 28, 2014, about a year and a half ago. I write two posts every week—a schedule I have now maintained for almost four years—so I shouldn’t have been […]
Depicting History in Images and Words (Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood, and me)
Over the Christmas break, I went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City to see a special exhibit called American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood. I’ve always liked Benton’s artwork. Each piece tells its own story, and his murals show aspects of an era or of our nation’s history so vividly that […]
Surviving a Year of Loss
As the first anniversary of my father’s death approaches (he died on January 5, 2015), I find myself increasingly melancholy. I’m no longer in shock, as I was for the first few weeks after he was gone. I recently read through my journal from those weeks, and I wondered how I managed to function. I […]
Sampler 1984
Last week I wrote about an emergency sewing project (putting my daughter’s name on her Christmas stocking). This post is another emergency sewing project, one that took place on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1984. I like to do needlepoint and cross-stitch, and I often have a project pending. But my projects tend to pend […]