Many of the posts on this blog are about my memories. My theme, after all, is “one writer’s journey through life and time.” And what is our journey, if not a collection of memories? Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “The Value of a Flawed Memory,” […]
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On Cats and Cat Pillows
On a chair in my guest room sit two handmade pillows with cats on them. Although I have owned dogs most of my married life, I really consider myself a cat person. But my husband is not. He wants dogs, only dogs. I embroidered one of the pillows when I […]
Continue readingSiblings as Targets and as Friends
Both my mother and my father grew up in families consisting of two siblings—an older brother and younger sister. I’ve always wondered if that is part of why they were so compatible, although they each had an uneasy relationship with their sibling for much of their lives. I’ve written before […]
Continue readingTrue Confessions: My Sister Peeled Her Peas
My sister is now eligible for AARP membership and is an accomplished professional, but I often remember her as a child. She was born when I was eight-and-a-half, and I left home when she turned nine, so our common experiences were limited to those few years. We were both picky […]
Continue readingDaddy’s Date . . . No, Make that Grandpa’s Date!
The church where my sister was married had a very firm rule that any children who were members of the wedding party had to be at least five. My son, at age six, qualified to be a ring bearer. My daughter, who would turn three just days before the wedding, […]
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 readingMy Father’s Bookcase: A New Family Heirloom
When I was a very young, my father made a bookcase. It’s made of a pretty wood (maybe oak?), and it is solid. It has a curved lip on the front facing at the top of the bookcase. I thought that made it a fancy piece of furniture when I […]
Continue readingChange in Plans—In This Blog as in Life
I had a humorous post lined up for today, but I learned Monday night that my father had passed away suddenly. You may remember that my mother died on July 4. He had missed her terribly for the last six months. He told me after Christmas that it was the […]
Continue readingHand-Me-Downs: The Little Blue Coat
As the oldest child, I didn’t have to wear many hand-me-downs. Occasionally, I wore clothes from the daughter of my mother’s friend. When I reached junior high, I sometimes had to wear something of my mother’s. I hated that, because styles meant for a thirty-something woman in the late 1960s […]
Continue readingBefore the Good Ones Are Taken
I mentioned last week that I left home for college about the time my sister turned nine. She soon found out that she missed me more than she thought she would. Shortly after I arrived at Middlebury College, my sister wrote me a letter. I don’t have the letter any […]
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