April 10 is National Siblings Day. Although I have written many posts about siblings—my siblings, my mother and her brother, my father and his sister, and my own children as siblings—I have never posted specifically about National Siblings Day. National Siblings Day is a day to celebrate one’s siblings. It […]
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Tossing Treasures
I’ve been through a first round of sorting most of my old photographs now, and I’ve thrown out a lot of them. The remainder are mostly grouped by year. I am thankful for my daughter’s efforts in the late 1990s to sort the photos we had then, and I am […]
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Remembering My Mother as a Grandmother
Now that I’m a grandmother, I find myself thinking of my mother more frequently. Though I know comparisons are irrelevant, I reminisce about what my mother did as a grandmother when my kids were babies. She lived about as far away from us then as I live from my granddaughter […]
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Reviewing Old Photographs: More Treasures, Not Much Trash
Before we moved into our current home in 2019, I did a lot of cleaning and sorting, which revealed many treasures and trash. But there were many boxes I moved from one house to the next without any review. Some of those were boxes of things from my parents, and […]
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My Granddaughter’s First Birthday — Another Early Valentine
As I mentioned in my last post, my granddaughter just passed her first birthday. My husband and I were privileged to visit her for the occasion and to celebrate with her, her parents, and other family members. We had other reasons for making the trip, but I timed it to […]
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Letters to My Grandchild: A Writing Exercise in Intimidation
Every once in a while I come across a book that intimidates me. Sometimes, it’s too long. Sometimes, it’s too literary or slow for my tastes, and I don’t want to commit. Sometimes, it’s just not appealing. I don’t like to stop books in the middle, but sometimes I do, […]
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Home Alone for Christmas
My husband and I spent Christmas by ourselves this year. Most of our 46 Christmases together have been whirlwinds of activity, usually with travel to one set of our parents or the other. In more recent years, one or both of our adult children have usually come to visit. But […]
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Christmas Lights
I feel like a curmudgeon this year because our house is one of only two or three on our cul-de-sac that does not have Christmas lights on the front of the house. I like driving through the neighborhood and seeing all the lights, but I don’t want the effort (or […]
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Buying Christmas Gifts for My Granddaughter
I’ve always been amazed by this photograph of the gifts I received on my first Christmas. Granted, we spent that holiday with my maternal grandparents, and I was their first grandchild. They doted on me. I think my grandmother bought everything in sight for me that year. But really? An […]
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Reflecting on Anniversaries and the Days In Between
Our 46th wedding anniversary was last weekend. Number forty-six doesn’t merit much recognition, though I gave my husband a couple of Hallmark cards. We ate Thanksgiving leftovers, so I didn’t have to cook. It snowed the night before, but the weather warmed enough that no shoveling was necessary. Still, we […]
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