The Future Is in Her Hands

I recently wrote about how cool it is when your kid is good at something that you aren’t able to do at all.  But how about when your kid is BETTER than you at something you are pretty good at? My family are writers from way back.  My mother has a journalism degree; a former [...]

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A Breath of Smoke and Ashes

It’s there every time I go into the garage.  The smell of fire.  It’s there, and then I’m here: That’s not a place I really like to be, figuratively or otherwise.  In fact, it’s become a bit of a thing:  I don’t drive down that part of Northshore any more, no matter how inconvenient the [...]

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Red Red Red

In my pre-fire life, I used to think about redecorating my kitchen.  Apparently some people actually do that kind of thing, but in a single-income seven-member family, you replace things when they break with whatever you can afford–you don’t “redecorate.”  Granted after twenty-some years of marriage and five kids, most of what we had started [...]

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Sanctuary

When I was eleven my family moved to a new house. It was a split level, and I had the basement bedroom. I had a three yellow walls, one wall with yellow roses, and wall-to-wall spring green carpet under my French Provincial 1970s bedroom suite, complete with canopy bed (covered with one of Mima’s afghans, [...]

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Cat People

This morning, the first thing on the agenda is to take Mace to the vet for his first set of shots.  Mace is one of three now half-grown kittens who adopted us when we moved here. We didn’t start off being cat people.  John never had a cat growing up.  In fact, he SAID he [...]

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New and New to Me

For seven years, our family lived here: It was built in 1889, and parts of it didn’t seem to have been replaced since then.  It had been patched and smoothed over so that we did not realize what we were getting into until it began to disintegrate around us.  We are not handy and we [...]

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Evidence of Conviction

“If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” As Christians, our lives are supposed to be our witness.  In the Gospel of John (13:35), Jesus said to His disciples: “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”  [...]

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The Book Addict Gets Her Fix

We had eleven bookshelves in our last home.  Several were floor-to-ceiling and almost all were full.  And there were boxes in the garage, and stacks and stacks all over the house.  And we were always buying more. The loss of my books was a tragedy of a magnitude I doubt a non-bibiliophile can appreciate.  Call [...]

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Best Laid Plans

This week my life became simultaneously easier and harder.  Explain, you ask?  Well, over the weekend we acquired a new (to us) car (more on that in a moment).  So no longer do I have to drive Teddy to school while John drives Lorelei.   Teddy gets to drive himself!  No longer must I roll [...]

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A Quarter of a Century

That’s how long ago it’s been, as of today, that John and I have been a couple.  On February 16, 1987, he asked me if I would be interested in going out with him, and I bet if he could have seen the future, he would have run the other way instead.  But I guess [...]

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