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Treasured family writing from the past One of the great things about living in a house built in the 1800s by my great-grandparents is that it’s full of old family stuff. Okay, you probably already knew that. However, the old stuff here that I treasure the most are the letters and notes from the distant, […]
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Musings on all things October. Well, some things. Yesterday was my least favorite holiday – Halloween. Actually, it’s not even a holiday – just a plain day that for some reason gets a name with a capital letter. It could just as well be called October Thirty-First Day. Or, Moving-Quickly-Towards-Thanksgiving Day. Or, Where-Did-Summer-Go? Day. Take […]
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Fun Adventures – For Ivy Scarlett Ivy Scarlett had a fun (for her; for me, not so much) field trip last week. Ivy Scarlett, in case you just tuned in, is the German Shepherd/Husky mix Bing and I adopted l0 years ago when she was a year old. She’d been abandoned near Nevada, IA, and […]
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If I’d never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds,” I wouldn’t have fallen on my back a couple of Fridays ago. Some of you may remember the movie – thousands of birds swooped all over a village, down chimneys into houses, terrorizing, among others, Tippi Hedren, who screamed prettily yet maintained her perfect hairdo throughout […]
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Remember when, remember when . . . Labor Day weekend for the past few years has become a time when our offspring converge here from California, Minnesota and southern Iowa. This year, four/fifths of our children made it. Offspring #5 had just started his first week of teaching English in a new school, so he […]
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Paying for Poor Performance Every year, we read stories of corporate Board of Directors firing a senior executive for unsatisfactory performance and then paying the executive millions of dollars upon his or her departure. Usually, the story talks about a Chief Executive Officer but sometimes it is another executive. Excessive payments to departing executives are […]
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Once upon a time, I thought I would become a nun. I was six years old and had a sweet young teacher in first grade – Sister Ethel. My vocation lasted an hour or so, until I decided being a cowboy would be more fun. We never used the term “cowgirl” back then. Roy Rogers […]
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Pies and Such Our church put out an S.O.S. last week, asking members to please bake more pies for our fair stand. It seems the ones on hand were going like hot cakes – or hot pies – or hot somethings. Everyone who had a piece of pie at our church stand can be extremely […]
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I made my once-or-twice-a-summer overnight visit to Okoboji last week. When I was younger, the visits extended over weeks at a time. My cousin, Margaret Ann, spent the whole summer with her family at their cottage and, since we are close in age (she’ll tell you I’m several months older, but she lies), I was […]
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