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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A Pox on Chickenpox (Part 1)
My kids were born several years before the chickenpox vaccine was available. The measles/mumps/rubella vaccine existed, and I dutifully had them inoculated with the MMR shot at the appropriate age. But all we could do was wait to see if they got exposed to the chickenpox. I remembered the chickenpox […]
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Random Photos: Thanksgiving 1988
Every so often I thumb through one of my boxes of old photographs. This time I kept thumbing until I found something suitable for a November blog post, so I suppose my choice isn’t really random at all. For this post, I selected an envelope of pictures my father took […]
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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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Working Across Time and Across Generations
My husband and I recently were fortunate to have visits from our two adult children. Our son came for a few days at the end of April, and our daughter was here over Mother’s Day. I remember my mother telling me one time how nice it was to have her […]
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A Mother’s Speech to Her Son, With Compliments to Kipling
I mentioned in a post in March that I was looking for the speech I gave at my son’s Eagle Scout ceremony. I’d found pictures of him at that event, but I didn’t know where the speech was. In another monumental cleaning project a couple of weeks ago, I found […]
Continue readingYo, Mom: An Introduction to the Teenage Years
I’ve written before about our family’s trips to the Absaroka Ranch in Wyoming, where we spent a summer week riding horses, except for occasional breaks to hike or go river-rafting. On our last trip in 1994, my son was twelve. It was his third time to the ranch (or the […]
Continue readingO Christmas Tree . . . and Keepsakes Ornaments
My husband and I are fans of live Christmas trees. Actually, I’d be tempted to have an artificial tree, but I love the evergreen scent of a real tree. So I put up with the messy needles every year. For the past several years, we’ve purchased Fraser firs, an evergreen […]
Continue readingBusted! by Ghostbusters (1984)
I don’t have any particular desire to see the Ghostbusters movie which just opened, but the trailers and reviews that I’ve been seeing bring back memories of the first Ghostbusters movie, released in 1984. My husband and I did see that movie. We’ve always liked movies—our first date was to […]
Continue readingLoneliness and Pampering at Summer Camp
I wrote last summer about my son’s first overnight camp experience, at the YMCA’s Camp Wood in Kansas. He loved it and wanted to go again. His little sister was eager to go to camp as well. My husband and I had been less impressed with Camp Wood than our […]
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