A Tale of Two Trunks

When I went away to college at age seventeen, I took my mother’s college trunk with me. She had been given the trunk when she went to college in 1951. When she gave it to me in 1973, it had sat in the unfinished part of the basement in my […]

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Treasures and Trash: Down Memory Lane

In our decluttering plan, I assigned my husband to clean the basement. Most of the things down there are his, so that made sense to me. Plus, the unfinished portion of our basement is known for harboring large spiders, and I have arachnophobia. He has been slow to get to […]

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The Lemon Juice Incident

I wrote a previous post about an unfortunate situation involving orange juice. There is an earlier incident in my marriage involving lemon juice. Forty years ago, in the summer of 1978, my husband and I both had clerkships (what law students call internships) in Los Angeles. We had been married […]

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THE PAPER CHASE and Other Chases

This Saturday, March 4, 2017, marks the 40th anniversary of the first date my husband and I ever went on. We’d planned another date in early January 1977. That date had been to see The Paper Chase, a movie about first-year students at Harvard Law School. We were first-year students […]

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I Almost Lived in San Diego

When my husband and I were in our third year of law school, we had to decide where to settle after we graduated. We’d spent the summer after our second year in Los Angeles, each clerking for a different law firm. Neither of us liked Los Angeles—we’d worked there primarily […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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