I wrote on Monday about my children and their cousins. The picture above is my favorite picture of the four of them, primarily because I know the story behind it. They were singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to the adults that were present. The youngest, my daughter, was nineteen months […]
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Friends: Sometimes Mothers Know Best
When I arrived at Middlebury College, I knew no one. The college did a reasonably good job of throwing freshmen together on a variety of activities, but friendships must develop at their own pace and in their own time. The day we moved into the dorm, I was wearing a […]
Continue readingHalloween Costumes: Making Good and Making Do
My husband and I have been invited to a Halloween party requiring costumes, and we are panicked. What will we wear? I’ve seldom put a lot of effort into Halloween. As I’ve written before, I am the pumpkin carver in the family, and we usually have a jack o’lantern for […]
Continue readingSeeking the Familiar in the New: The Columbia and the Rhine
I think it is human nature that we try to make sense of our world, to organize what we encounter in life so it makes sense with what we already know. I had this experience on our recent cruise along the Rhine River. Each place I saw, I thought, “This […]
Continue readingOn Baking Cakes: Generations of Life Lessons
My mother’s death brought to mind many memories for all her family members. My son sent my father a letter describing one of his memories–a time when my mother instructed him in how to bake a cake. He was a Cub Scout at the time, and the pack was holding […]
Continue readingTravels to Europe As Book Ends of a Career
In August 1979, shortly after the bar exam, my husband and I traveled to London for two weeks. It was our delayed honeymoon, almost two years after we were married, and celebrated the end of law school and the beginning of our working careers. We knew that it would be […]
Continue readingHappy 50th Birthday To My Sister!
My brother and children seem to think they get treated unfairly in this blog, so this time it’s my sister’s turn. She turns fifty this week, so she is fair game. My sister was born when I was eight and a half. Too much younger to be a friend when […]
Continue readingMemories of Friends and Mothers
When I visited my father in August, I decided to make a peach cobbler and needed a recipe. I should have just turned to this blog, where I have posted a very good recipe for peach cobbler. But I went to my mother’s old cookbooks instead, because my father didn’t […]
Continue readingFamily Resemblances: The Dutch Boy Look
One of the pictures I found when I made the slide show of my mother’s life for her funeral was this photograph of her as a small child on a pony. I don’t recognize the building behind her, so I don’t know where the picture was taken. I have no […]
Continue readingBack to School Across Two Generations
In recent weeks I’ve been following all my Facebook friends’ pictures of their children headed back to school—from the kindergarteners to the college-bound. I’m glad those days are behind me, though I have good memories both of my own back-to-school days and my children’s. When I was young, school never […]
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