My mother’s death brought to mind many memories for all her family members. My son sent my father a letter describing one of his memories–a time when my mother instructed him in how to bake a cake. He was a Cub Scout at the time, and the pack was holding […]
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Before 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 […]
Continue readingMemories of Friends and Mothers
When I visited my father in August, I decided to make a peach cobbler and needed a recipe. I should have just turned to this blog, where I have posted a very good recipe for peach cobbler. But I went to my mother’s old cookbooks instead, because my father didn’t […]
Continue readingFamily Resemblances: The Dutch Boy Look
One of the pictures I found when I made the slide show of my mother’s life for her funeral was this photograph of her as a small child on a pony. I don’t recognize the building behind her, so I don’t know where the picture was taken. I have no […]
Continue readingBreak a Leg (Or At Least a Foot)
Those of you who have read my story “Competitive Yoga” in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Shaping the New You (story available online here, and book available from Amazon here), know that I took up yoga several years ago. You also know that I hate exercise. My experience described in “Competitive Yoga” […]
Continue readingUntold Stories From Pictures: A Brother-Sister Relationship
One of my tasks before my mother’s recent funeral was to put together a slide show of her life. I’ve mentioned in an earlier post that my father and maternal grandfather both took many photographs over the years, so the problem was not finding pictures of my mother. She lived […]
Continue readingTime Is Ticking
I wrote a few weeks ago about preparing for the bar exam. I revealed in that post that my husband and I both passed, but I didn’t write about the difficulty of the exam itself. In the summer of 1979, the Missouri Bar held the bar exam for aspiring lawyers […]
Continue readingMusings On My 250th Post
WordPress keeps excellent statistics for bloggers, and so I realized recently that today’s post would be my 250th post. This milestone seemed worthy of comment. I’ve been blogging for about two-and-a-half years, for most of that time twice per week. I’ve written before about lessons I’ve learned blogging, and I […]
Continue readingSailing Along
A few years after we moved to Kansas City, my husband bought a sailing canoe. You have probably never seen a sailing canoe—they are rare, for good reason. A sailing canoe is a regular canoe to which a mast and a keel can be attached. Ours looked something like this […]
Continue readingPolitics: Some Things Never Change
I deliberately keep this blog away from politics. I’m told that writing about a hot-button issue is a sure way to increase blog traffic, but I’m not sure those are the readers I want to reach. I am bemused, however, as I do historical research, how little things have changed […]
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