I’ve written before about the two times I broke my left foot (see here and here). Well, I broke another bone in that same foot many years earlier. During the winter of my 8th-grade year, I broke the fourth toe. The odd thing is that within a year, both of […]
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Infrastructure, circa 1962
There’s been a lot in the news in recent years about infrastructure. Which projects are “shovel ready”? Which will create more jobs? How do we bring our aging roads and bridges into the twenty-first century? When I hear about infrastructure, I think of the development of the interstate highway system […]
Continue readingMy Earliest Thanksgiving Memories
I’ve written before (see here and here) about how glad I am that my children spent so much time with their cousins growing up, because I didn’t have that experience as a kid. But I do remember one Thanksgiving my family spent with my cousins. It’s the earliest Thanksgiving I remember—1958, […]
Continue readingLittle Brother as Mother’s Escort
My husband and I will celebrate our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary soon. We were married just days after my youngest brother turned ten. His role during our wedding was to escort my mother into the church. He wore a tuxedo and looked so cute, as little boys usually do when they […]
Continue readingMemories: A Creative Blend of Fact and Fiction
Many of the posts on this blog are about my memories. My theme, after all, is “one writer’s journey through life and time.” And what is our journey, if not a collection of memories? Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “The Value of a Flawed Memory,” […]
Continue readingFlags and Foreboding
For the Fourth of July when I was seven, someone gave my brother (who was almost six) and me U.S. flags—one for each of us. Each flag was about 12 inches by 18 inches, and it was stapled to a thin dowel about two feet long. The dowel had a […]
Continue readingMay 18, 1980, Eruption of Mt. St. Helens
For most of the 1979-1980 school year, my parents lived apart. My father had started a new job in Bellevue, Washington, and my mother remained in Richland, Washington, with my younger sister and brother who were in school there. My sister was in her sophomore year of high school, and […]
Continue readingNursery School: Singing in the Rain
The Willamette Valley is wet. That’s what I remember most about the winters when we lived in Corvallis, Oregon, between 1959 and 1961. As I am writing my current work-in-progress, I find it easy to write about winters on homesteads near Oregon City—I just think of my preschool days. Wet. […]
Continue readingStories I Couldn’t Tell Before: Driving Dad’s Oldsmobile
When I was in high school, my father had this huge Oldsmobile 98. It was a big four-door sedan, the biggest car Oldsmobile made. The V8 engine could tow a boat crammed full of boxes for a summer on the lake. The passenger compartment could transport our family of six, […]
Continue readingHalf a Generation, But Not So Far Apart
My youngest sibling is eleven-and-a-half years younger than me, and he was not yet six when I left for college. I was his primary babysitter from the time he was just a few months old until I left home. In those early years, he sometimes felt as much like my […]
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