Milestone: Deleting My Father’s Email
Today, April 25, 2018, would have been my father’s 85th birthday. (He was 52 days younger than my mother, so her 85th birthday passed several weeks ago.) He died on January 5, 2015, and we held his memorial service on April 25, 2015—three years ago today, on what would have been his 82nd birthday. I […]
Six Years of Blogging: A Measure of Time and an Assessment of Life
I launched my blog “Story & History: One writer’s journey through life and time” in January 2012, publishing only three short posts that month. It took awhile to find my rhythm (stepped up to publishing twice a week) and my voice. For five years, I published on WordPress.com, and last year I moved here to […]
Random Photos: Thanksgiving 1988
Every so often I thumb through one of my boxes of old photographs. This time I kept thumbing until I found something suitable for a November blog post, so I suppose my choice isn’t really random at all. For this post, I selected an envelope of pictures my father took during a visit my parents […]
A Belated Veterans Day Post
It seems that in over five years of writing this blog, I have never written about Veterans Day. This year, I am finally doing it, albeit a couple of days late. I never expected to be part of a military family. I didn’t have any veterans among my relatives. Neither of my grandfathers served during […]
The Baggage We Tote Around
In this phase of my life, I sometimes find that I am a bag lady. I often spend an entire day away from my house in meetings with other writers, in workshops and webinars, and in many other activities. For example, last Saturday, I attended a writing workshop from 9:00 am until 4:00 pm. And […]
A Halloween Story I’ve Never Told Before: Alone with the Wind
Every year on Halloween night, I remember Halloween night in 1963, when I was seven years old. Our family had just moved into a newly constructed house in a new neighborhood about a month earlier. I had my own bedroom for the first time in my life. My room was on the corner of the […]
My Great-Grandmother Della Phillips Jones
The great-grandmother I know the least about is my father’s maternal grandmother, Della Phillips Jones. All I ever knew about her growing up was that she had been married before she married my great-grandfather, and her daughter (my grandmother) had a half-sister from Della’s first marriage who was quite a bit older than she was. […]
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 […]
Great-Grandma Lillie: A Midwestern Pioneer
I was thinking recently about my great-grandmothers. It dawned on me that they all probably had very interesting lives—or at least interesting from the perspective of the 21st Century. I never met any of the four women, and only one was alive during my childhood. That great-grandmother was Lillie Evelena Smith Claudson. She’s the great-grandmother […]
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 […]