I’ve written before about my grandfather’s clock—how it formed a part of my childhood, first in my grandparents’ home and then in my parents’; how I deliberately let it wind down after my father died; how I shipped to to my house and got it working again. (see here and […]
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My Mother’s Last Doll
I’ve written before about my first doll. I’ve written about my mother’s Storybook Bride doll that I could never play with. And I’ve written about the sewing doll that my grandmother and I made clothes for. This post is about my mother’s last doll. It wasn’t really a doll. It […]
Continue readingA Story I Couldn’t Tell Before: The Sister I Never Knew
Shortly before my mother’s death, my father and I reviewed the draft obituaries my parents had written for themselves several years earlier, long before my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. At the time my father showed me the obituaries, my mother was about to go into hospice. We knew we […]
Continue readingYou Say Grandma, I Say Nanny . . . Doesn’t Have the Same Ring As Potayto, Potahto
I’ve mentioned before that I called my maternal grandmother Nanny Winnie. How I came to call her that started on my father’s side of the family when my older cousin began calling our common grandmother Nanny Kay. I was the second of Nanny Kay’s grandchildren (though a third was born […]
Continue readingSalvaging Nooks and Books
I’ve written before about my love/hate relationship with technology. That post recently showed up on my Facebook memories, so I reposted it on Facebook with a comment: “Unfortunately, it’s been three years since this post. More computer upgrades can’t be too far in my future.” That was on January 23, […]
Continue readingSiblings as Targets and as Friends
Both my mother and my father grew up in families consisting of two siblings—an older brother and younger sister. I’ve always wondered if that is part of why they were so compatible, although they each had an uneasy relationship with their sibling for much of their lives. I’ve written before […]
Continue readingSnow Days: A Recent Phenomenon
Maybe this is one of those “when I was young, we had it tough” stories. But when I was young, we didn’t have snow days. At least, I don’t remember my classes ever being canceled due to snow, nor for any weather-related events. It might have happened, but I don’t […]
Continue readingSurviving a Year of Loss
As the first anniversary of my father’s death approaches (he died on January 5, 2015), I find myself increasingly melancholy. I’m no longer in shock, as I was for the first few weeks after he was gone. I recently read through my journal from those weeks, and I wondered how […]
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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