My mother died on July 4 last year, so I am completing a year of firsts—the first Thanksgiving without her, the first Christmas, her birthday in early March, St. Patrick’s Day (a big holiday for her), Easter, Mother’s Day, and now the anniversary of her death. In many ways, I […]
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An Almost Sixty-Year Love Story, or Sixty-Six, If You Start at the Beginning
Shortly after Christmas last year, my father commented to me that it was the first Christmas in sixty-six years he had not spent with my mother. “Ever since I took her to the Snow Ball when we were sophomores in high school,” he said. They started dating as fifteen-year-olds, “went […]
Continue readingStories I Couldn’t Tell Before: The Communion Host
I’ve known since I began writing this blog that there were stories I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell until after my parents were dead. But I thought it would be many more years before I could tell them. A year ago, both of my parents were alive (though my mother’s Alzheimer’s […]
Continue readingThe Doll I Never Played With
My mother had a collection of Storybook dolls when she was a girl. Several of them lasted until I was a child. They were all about four to five inches tall, porcelain with painted faces and painted shoes, “real” hair stitched and glued to their heads, and dressed in beautiful […]
Continue readingFamily Resemblances Redux
I hadn’t seen this picture of my mother until I found it in an old picture album when I was preparing a slide show of her life for her funeral last summer. I love the youth and innocence she depicts from a time long before she was my mother. Until […]
Continue readingA Kitchen Bargain
My father liked to cook, but my mother did not. Cooking was required of a good homemaker, and she vowed to be a good homemaker. So she prepared the meals all the years her children were growing up, and did so reasonably well. But her heart was never in it. […]
Continue readingThe Evil Blue Pyrex Dish
I discovered as I cleaned out my parents’ house that there was a memory in every drawer and cupboard. The memories would surprise me—I had no warning of when one would strike. One afternoon when I was alone in the house I looked through kitchen cabinets, trying to decide if […]
Continue readingHappy Birthday (and Easter) to me!
April 5 is my birthday. This year, for the first time in my life, my birthday was on Easter. The date for Easter, as most people know, floats around during the spring. In theory, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But the […]
Continue readingTwo Poets in the Family: Happy Easter . . . and an early Happy Mother’s Day
In going through the mementos my parents kept, I’ve discovered another way in which my mother and I were alike. We both wrote poetry to our families as children. Here’s a poem I wrote for Easter as a child. I can’t date it exactly, but because I referred to “grandmother” […]
Continue readingWhat Is Cottolene?
After helping me clean out my parents’ house after my father died, my husband got the bug to clean out our house. He has never liked clutter. Although most of the clutter in our home is hidden in cupboards and drawers, it is there, and he hates it. He started […]
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