A few nights ago I was awake in the middle of the night, one of those nights when I could not sleep. About 1:38 am, I heard a train whistle cry mournfully through the dark. And I got to thinking about all the train whistles I’ve heard through the years. […]
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Treasures in My Mother’s Bible
When I was cleaning out my parents’ house after my father’s death in January 2015, one of the things I sent to my home was my mother’s Bible. Her mother gave it to her for Christmas 1951, during my future mother’s senior year of high school. It is the Bible […]
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Mother’s Silver Souvenir Spoons
My mother collected silver souvenir spoons from foreign countries. Some showed national symbols and some were specific to a major city. There didn’t seem to be any particular theme to the spoons. Their purchase was more opportunistic. I think my mother’s parents started the tradition when they traveled in Europe […]
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Random Photos: Thanksgiving 1988
Every so often I thumb through one of my boxes of old photographs. This time I kept thumbing until I found something suitable for a November blog post, so I suppose my choice isn’t really random at all. For this post, I selected an envelope of pictures my father took […]
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Random Photos: Going Home Again . . . A Vacation Remembered
My husband and I didn’t take too many summer vacations at my parents’ home when our kids were growing up. We saved our visits for every third Christmas. In addition, my parents visited us once or twice a year in Kansas City, and we sent our kids out to Washington […]
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Different Forms of Grieving
I did not plan to write this week about losing my parents—that’s a subject I’ve covered many times in this blog (see here and here for examples). But this week is the third anniversary of my mother’s death, and the topic is on my mind. Three years sounds like a […]
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On Pillboxes and Parents
One of the things I found as I went through my parents’ memorabilia recently was a little white pillbox made of stone. I had a matching blue pillbox already on my dresser. It wasn’t until I saw the white one that I remembered—my mother gave me the blue version many […]
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Thoughts on Random Photos of the Absaroka Range
In the summer of 2015, when my sister and I went through family memorabilia from our parents’ house, we did a rough sort of our dad’s photographs. We threw the envelopes of negatives and prints into three piles—one for me, one for her, and one for our brother—based on whose […]
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Musings on Time in the Twenty-First Century . . . and Before
As of the end of May, we’ve spent 209 months in the 21st Century (I started my count in January 2000). So at the end of this month, we will be 17.4% into our new century. If time were the plot to a novel, we’d be almost finished with the first […]
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On Birthdays and Memory
Sixty years ago today was my first birthday. I was too young to remember it, but there is a fuzzy photograph of me in a high chair with a cake bearing one candle in front of me. I was the oldest grandchild on my mother’s side of the family, so […]
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