Break a Leg (Or At Least a Foot)

Those of you who have read my story “Competitive Yoga” in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Shaping the New You (story available online here, and book available from Amazon here), know that I took up yoga several years ago. You also know that I hate exercise. My experience described in “Competitive Yoga” […]

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Time Is Ticking

I wrote a few weeks ago about preparing for the bar exam. I revealed in that post that my husband and I both passed, but I didn’t write about the difficulty of the exam itself. In the summer of 1979, the Missouri Bar held the bar exam for aspiring lawyers […]

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Liberation and Independence

One of the joys of blogging is finding other writers who touch your heart and soul. My last post was about my mother’s death on July 4. That night I was unable to sleep. The Independence Day fireworks screamed and popped throughout our suburban neighborhood, their celebratory bursts incongruous to […]

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Memories of Mother

A few weeks ago, my family started hospice care for my mother. She had been hospitalized, and when she returned to her assisted living facility, she had great difficulty eating and swallowing—a typical progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. She passed away on Friday, July 4, 2014. Needless to say, these recent […]

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Harrison, Idaho, and Summer Parades

I’ve written before about the idyllic summers I spent during my teenage years on Coeur d’Alene Lake in Idaho. Some of my memories are of boating to Harrison, Idaho, a small town across the lake from where my parents’ cabin was. Harrison had the most accessible Catholic church on the […]

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Proof of When I Couldn’t Write

I’ve mentioned before that I can’t remember not knowing how to read. I learned to read quite young, and I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t name each letter of the alphabet on the page. And as far back as I can remember, I knew the letters were put […]

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Which Ugliest Town in America?

I first visited Missouri in early June 1977, before my now-husband and I were married. I’ve described that visit—the trip to Fort Osage and the making of gooseberry pie. But what I didn’t say in that post was that I thought his hometown of Marshall, Missouri, was the ugliest town […]

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Memorial Day and a Tantrum To Remember

I described my son’s tantrum in my last post, so it’s only fair that in this post I describe one of his sister’s—her first tantrum, in fact. It occurred on Memorial Day, when she was just two weeks old. My husband and I took our family to see his parents […]

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