Before the Good Ones Are Taken
I mentioned last week that I left home for college about the time my sister turned nine. She soon found out that she missed me more than she thought she would. Shortly after I arrived at Middlebury College, my sister wrote me a letter. I don’t have the letter any more, but it made its […]
Happy 50th Birthday To My Sister!
My brother and children seem to think they get treated unfairly in this blog, so this time it’s my sister’s turn. She turns fifty this week, so she is fair game. My sister was born when I was eight and a half. Too much younger to be a friend when we were growing up. Not […]
Memories of Friends and Mothers
When I visited my father in August, I decided to make a peach cobbler and needed a recipe. I should have just turned to this blog, where I have posted a very good recipe for peach cobbler. But I went to my mother’s old cookbooks instead, because my father didn’t have any Bisquick, and my […]
Scrivener: Software for Writers
I recently started using Scrivener, a software program designed for writers. I’ve used WriteWay Pro off and on for several years, but Scrivener is touted as the latest and greatest program for writers, and I wanted to give it a try. Scrivener, WriteWay Pro, and similar writing programs are designed to take writers from the research […]
A Rest at Lake Chelan, Washington
In August, my husband and I were fortunate enough to take a couple of days after my mother’s funeral for a respite at Lake Chelan, Washington. There’s something so calming about staying on the lake shore, as I’ve written before (see here and here) Maybe because when I am by a lake I remember my childhood […]
Family Resemblances: The Dutch Boy Look
One of the pictures I found when I made the slide show of my mother’s life for her funeral was this photograph of her as a small child on a pony. I don’t recognize the building behind her, so I don’t know where the picture was taken. I have no idea what the occasion was […]
Back to School Across Two Generations
In recent weeks I’ve been following all my Facebook friends’ pictures of their children headed back to school—from the kindergarteners to the college-bound. I’m glad those days are behind me, though I have good memories both of my own back-to-school days and my children’s. When I was young, school never started until after Labor Day. […]
News of California Gold Decimates the Population of Oregon
Word of the Sutter’s Fort gold discovery reached Oregon in the summer of 1848. Oregon learned of the gold finds indirectly, not from travelers arriving straight from California. Ships from California came to Oregon after stopping in Hawaii that summer. They brought the news about the gold. In July 1848, the brig Honolulu docked at […]
Break a Leg (Or At Least a Foot)
Those of you who have read my story “Competitive Yoga” in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Shaping the New You (story available online here, and book available from Amazon here), know that I took up yoga several years ago. You also know that I hate exercise. My experience described in “Competitive Yoga” was not the first time […]
Parenting the Parents: On Being a Sounding Board
August 1979, thirty-five years ago this month, was the first time I felt I was more of an adult than my parents. After my husband and I graduated from law school and took the bar exam, he had to go on his two weeks’ annual training with the Naval Reserves, and I went to visit […]