An Early Start on College

This post is about my mother, though not about Mother’s Day. While searching for a topic for a Mother’s Day post, I came across a photograph of my mother and me in an album my grandmother made for me many years ago. I’ve always liked this photo, because it shows […]

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Icing on My Cake for Mother’s Day

My daughter was born the day before Mother’s Day. Some years her birthday has been on Mother’s Day—including her first birthday. Obviously, a small child’s birthday takes precedence over Mother’s Day. Even a grown daughter’s birthday takes precedence in our family. But I’ve never minded sharing “my” day with my […]

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Mother’s Day Memento

On one of the spring vacations my family took, we were in a gift shop full of tchotchkes. Neither my husband nor I am fond of tchotchkes, and I was ready to move on. Nothing in the store looked interesting to me. But our children wanted to browse, to find […]

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Remembering: It’s What Mothers Do

My daughter chastises me for not documenting her childhood completely in her baby book. She claims I didn’t write as much about her as about her older brother. This week – the week of her birthday as well as of Mother’s Day – I’ve gone back and looked at her […]

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Catalpa: Fine Dining in Arrow Rock, MO

On Monday, I wrote about the Oregon Trail emigrants choosing their leaders on the Kansas and Nebraska prairies. This post back-tracks to Arrow Rock, Missouri, where my first Oregon Trail novel begins. And today’s post is about a superb meal I had in Arrow Rock in 2012 – 165 years […]

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Happy Mother’s Day to My Mother, the Writer

I spent the first thirty years of my life trying not to be like my mother.  But around my 30th birthday, the realization dawned that, however much I protested, we are in many ways quite similar. My mother was valedictorian of her high school class and a Phi Beta Kappa […]

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