I’ve written before about my dislike of beauty parlors, which dates back to early childhood. I have never been comfortable in salons, even though most of the time the stylists gave me better haircuts than when my mother cut my hair at home. However, a couple of weeks ago I […]
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The Great-Grandmother I Know the Most About: Cecelia Ryan Strachan
I never knew my great-grandmother Cecelia Ryan Strachan, my maternal grandmother’s mother. In fact, Cecelia died before my mother was born, so my mother never knew this grandmother either. But I can piece together some facts about Cecelia’s life, from family stories and from Sacramento newspaper articles and histories. That’s […]
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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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My First Broken Bone
As I wrote last week, my husband and I are dealing with his broken kneecap. He had surgery, which successfully wired the bone pieces back together, and he is moving pretty well a week later, but he will be in the knee immobilizer for several weeks longer. His broken patella […]
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Six Years of Blogging: A Measure of Time and an Assessment of Life
I launched my blog “Story & History: One writer’s journey through life and time” in January 2012, publishing only three short posts that month. It took awhile to find my rhythm (stepped up to publishing twice a week) and my voice. For five years, I published on WordPress.com, and last […]
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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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The Baggage We Tote Around
In this phase of my life, I sometimes find that I am a bag lady. I often spend an entire day away from my house in meetings with other writers, in workshops and webinars, and in many other activities. For example, last Saturday, I attended a writing workshop from 9:00 […]
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A Halloween Story I’ve Never Told Before: Alone with the Wind
Every year on Halloween night, I remember Halloween night in 1963, when I was seven years old. Our family had just moved into a newly constructed house in a new neighborhood about a month earlier. I had my own bedroom for the first time in my life. My room was […]
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Discovering Jane Austen
Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817, two hundred years ago tomorrow. I first encountered her novels in the spring of 1970, when I was in the ninth grade and cooped up at home with the mumps. I didn’t have a bad case of the mumps, and I felt pretty […]
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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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