My father died five years ago yesterday, on January 5, 2015. His death was sudden—I’d spoken to him the day before, and I’d had emails from him that morning. My brother talked to him that evening as our dad decided to go to the hospital because of some abdominal pain. […]
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Wedding Photographs of Siblings and Spouses
As I wrote recently, I’ve had weddings on my mind. Here’s another post on the subject of weddings. This time, the bride(s) and groom(s) are me and my siblings. Specifically, this post is about framed wedding pictures of me and my spouse and my siblings and their spouses. My mother […]
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Best Wishes to My Son and Daughter-in-Law on Their Wedding
Yesterday my son married his long-time girlfriend in a small and lovely ceremony in New York. So I’ve had weddings on my mind for many weeks. I can’t help but compare their situation to my own. My son and his wife have been together for many years; my husband and […]
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Mrs. Birdsong’s Bell Pull
My husband and I are starting to think about what to hang on the walls in our new house. Before we moved, our daughter told me, “Mother, if you don’t hang your pictures within a week after you move, you’ll never do it.” I disagreed with her then, and I […]
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Unwritten Words: Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of My Mother’s Death
“Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!” ―from “The Voiceless,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes I ran across an approximation of this quote in my mother’s journal entry for July 28, 1999. Specifically, her journal reads, “‘Alas for those who never sing (or write), […]
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Random Memory of My Dad, the Butcher
On Father’s Day, of course, I think of my father. And in the summertime, I think of summers long ago. This year, a random memory of my father popped into my head—I remembered going to see my father work as a butcher while he was in graduate school. I’ve mentioned […]
Continue readingFifty Years Ago: My 8th Grade Graduation
I wrote recently about my daughter’s 8th-grade graduation in 1999. After I wrote that post, I realized my own 8th-grade graduation was thirty years earlier—in late May or early June 1969. That’s fifty years ago—hard to believe it is half a century in the past. No lightning struck our house […]
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An Ongoing Search for My Mother
I’ve written before that I spent the first thirty years of my life trying not to be like my mother, and the next thirty realizing how much we were alike. And now that I’m over sixty? I’m trying to find my mother, who died when I was fifty-eight. Mother and […]
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A Tale of Two Trunks
When I went away to college at age seventeen, I took my mother’s college trunk with me. She had been given the trunk when she went to college in 1951. When she gave it to me in 1973, it had sat in the unfinished part of the basement in my […]
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Recipe: “Easy” Lemon Chicken
A couple of months ago, I thumbed through the recipe box my mother gave me before I was married. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but what I found was her recipe for Easy Lemon Chicken. This wasn’t a recipe from my childhood, and I don’t know where […]
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