In my family growing up, the tradition was to take down the Christmas tree before New Year’s Day. My mother said it was bad luck to keep the tree up any longer. I think her real reason was that she was allergic to evergreens and wanted the scent out of […]
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First Christmas Away from Home; First Christmas at Home
Christmas 1978 was the first Christmas I spent away from my parents’ home. My husband and I had been married just over a year, and it was my in-laws’ “turn” to have us. There’s an old Hallmark Cards television commercial about a young woman experiencing her first Christmas away from […]
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A Not So Random Photo: My Parents’ 20th Anniversary
On June 25, 1975, for my parents’ twentieth anniversary, I gave them a photographer’s sitting to have a family portrait made. It was the first time we had had a formal family picture taken, and, except for later weddings, the only formal portrait I can recall. The sitting cost me […]
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Memorial Day Means More as I Age
As I reviewed old posts, I realized I haven’t written much about Memorial Day. That’s because it was never a big occasion in my family growing up. We were new transplants to Richland, Washington, and didn’t have old relatives buried in the local cemetery. My grandparents were also the first […]
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Random Photos: Unaccompanied Minors and a Love of the West
As I look back on my childrearing years, one of the things I’m glad I did was to send my kids away from home. It gave my kids more independence and adventures than my husband and I could give them while we were busy with our jobs. Other than a […]
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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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Our Fortieth Anniversary: Memories and Treasures Through Generations
This year I’ve posted several times about my husband’s and my courtship forty years ago. (See here and here and here.) Yesterday, November 26, 2017, was our fortieth wedding anniversary. As we did the year we were married, we celebrated throughout the Thanksgiving weekend. This Thursday we hosted my husband’s […]
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The Long-Term Effects of Birth Order
Today is my sister’s birthday. Regular readers of this blog can figure out which one, but this post isn’t really about age. It’s about birth order and growing up and distance and—well, maybe it’s a little bit about age. My sister is eight and a half years younger than I […]
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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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