Random Photos: Going Home Again . . . A Vacation Remembered
My husband and I didn’t take too many summer vacations at my parents’ home when our kids were growing up. We saved our visits for every third Christmas. In addition, my parents visited us once or twice a year in Kansas City, and we sent our kids out to Washington State without us as soon […]
Amelia Earhart Day: Memories of Atchison, Kansas
July 24 is Amelia Earhart Day. The news recently has been full of speculation about her disappearance, because of a History Channel show suggesting that a photo might have shown her and her navigator Frank Noonan with the Japanese in the Marshall Islands after her disappearance on July 2, 1937. However, Japanese archivists found the […]
Random Photo: St. Louis, 1989, Our First Family Vacation
In the summer of 1989, when our daughter was four and our son seven, we took our first “real” family vacation. By that I mean, it was just my husband, me and the two kids, and we went somewhere other than to visit grandparents. We’d taken our son on a couple of trips before daughter […]
Thoughts on Random Photos of the Absaroka Range
In the summer of 2015, when my sister and I went through family memorabilia from our parents’ house, we did a rough sort of our dad’s photographs. We threw the envelopes of negatives and prints into three piles—one for me, one for her, and one for our brother—based on whose family was most featured on […]
Working Across Time and Across Generations
My husband and I recently were fortunate to have visits from our two adult children. Our son came for a few days at the end of April, and our daughter was here over Mother’s Day. I remember my mother telling me one time how nice it was to have her children visit by themselves, without […]
A Mother-Daughter Brunch and Fashion Show
My daughter went to an all-girls high school. One of my favorite events of the year was the mother-daughter brunch held each spring. After the meal at a hotel downtown, the senior class put on a fashion show, with the styles selected from several major retailers in our area. Each clothing store offered a different […]
Falling In—Two Tales from Chesapeake Bay (or thereabouts)
I’ve written before about spring vacations our family took when our kids were small—how I struggled to find a church in which to celebrate Easter and how I had to hide the Easter candy from my children. One memorable trip over Easter was a week in Virginia when the children were in grade school. We […]
Avoca Blankets: Evoking the Generations
In the summer of 2001, a few months before September 11, my daughter and I took a trip to Ireland. The trip was sponsored by her all-girls Catholic school. About ten mother/daughter pairs went, along with two teachers. The school had arranged several such trips over the years, but due to shenanigans on a previous […]
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. […]
Loneliness and Pampering at Summer Camp
I wrote last summer about my son’s first overnight camp experience, at the YMCA’s Camp Wood in Kansas. He loved it and wanted to go again. His little sister was eager to go to camp as well. My husband and I had been less impressed with Camp Wood than our son had been, so for […]