Icing on My Cake for Mother’s Day
My daughter was born the day before Mother’s Day. Some years her birthday has been on Mother’s Day—including her first birthday. Obviously, a small child’s birthday takes precedence over Mother’s Day. Even a grown daughter’s birthday takes precedence in our family. But I’ve never minded sharing “my” day with my daughter. After all, her birth […]
Mother’s Day Memento
On one of the spring vacations my family took, we were in a gift shop full of tchotchkes. Neither my husband nor I am fond of tchotchkes, and I was ready to move on. Nothing in the store looked interesting to me. But our children wanted to browse, to find some small mementoes to take […]
Easter Vigil Mass: Katholische Kirche?
One of the Easter vacations my family took when my kids were young was a trip to San Francisco. My husband was a Naval Reserve officer, and he got us into the Marines Memorial Club near Union Square downtown. It was a great location—convenient to many city attractions and to buses and cable cars. I […]
My Grandfather’s Quest for Sulfa
I didn’t know my grandfathers as well as my grandmothers. Maybe it’s natural for a girl to spend more time with her grandmothers. Maybe it’s because both my grandmothers had more forceful personalities than their husbands, my grandfathers. My maternal grandfather died when I was not quite ten, but I had lived with my maternal […]
What a Difference a Year Makes!
A year ago I was suffering from the worst stomach flu I’d had in a decade. And within days, my daughter would break her leg skiing, requiring me to leave my sick bed and fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, to care for her. Plus, my mother had just moved out of her home and into […]
Memories of Cold
We are ahead of pace on snowfall for the season, and the average low temperature this month has been about 18 degrees below average. It is cold. Monday morning this week, the temperature in Kansas City was -11 degrees. As luck would have it, I was scheduled to be in court on Monday to serve […]
You Know Your Children Are Grown When . . . [Part III]
I’ve written before about the change in perspective I’ve developed now that my children are grown. See here and here. Now, after our Christmas experiences this year, I am facing this upheaval again, because: One child is looking at buying a house . . . with a real estate agent sending daily lists of prospects, […]
Focus on the Present: Be a Buddha, Not a Janus
One morning last week as I wrote in my journal, I grumbled about the Midwestern cold and ice. The snow that had fallen a few days before Christmas had melted just enough to leave a glaze behind on walks and driveways. On Christmas Day I fell on the ice and injured my wrist. So the […]
Giving Up Divinity
My paternal grandmother’s chocolate fudge and divinity were part of many of my childhood Christmases, along with her fruitcake. I didn’t care for the fruitcake, but I did love the candy. She made two colors of divinity, pink and green. One of the batches she would make without nuts, because I didn’t like nuts in […]
Wintering in Oregon: Using Research, Reality, and Imagination
The emigrants who traveled the Oregon Trail arrived in the Willamette Valley in late fall, or even after the first snowfall of winter. What did they do then? They were relieved the long journey was over, I’m sure, but how did they go about building a new life? Beginning with Lewis and Clark, pioneers had […]