I was done teaching at the country school. Ken was busy working and I was beginning to feel antsy. I needed something to do. I decided to take a course in Irish history at the university. It was an enrichment class, not a regular university course. We met after the...
I was busy enough shopping, stoking fires, writing letters home, but I didn’t feel I was experiencing anything of the country (aside from the scary stuff of course.) Well as it happened, Ken’s friend’s father was principal of a small country school, just outside...
Tell me what you used to do. Our kids and grandkids want to know what we used to be like before we were mom and dad, GranMary and GranKen. I think about that and realize that after the kids came so much of our life was consumed by getting from one day to the next with...
I’m going to tell you the story of the Koral Kids and John’s pond. But you need a little background to take the story in. The first thing that helps to know is that the pond is in the back of the Cleveland house. (the same house I refer to in my book) It was designed...
Anita came in early spring. Snow still splotched on the ground. It was April. She had had a long flight from Calcutta to Frankfurt to Detroit. She’d been travel sick and the aid that was with her changed her from a ruffled dress (a dress to impress) to the yellow and...
Sung was eagerly anticipated by his siblings, Minh and Anita. They asked many times a day when he would come, what they could do with him, would he play with them? Well, he came and he was not what they anticipated, of course. He roared around the clock until he...
My oldest son asked me to blog about the time he lost his bear And, like most kids, he thinks he lost the bear he now has. Maybe he thinks I retrieved it for him. I didn’t though. Here’s how it was. He was young, maybe two or three. We were out walking in the...
EDIT (after airing): StateSide. NPR. My youngest son, in particular, always has stories about listening to it and how much he likes it. When the book first came out, my husband and oldest son had the idea of seeing whether or not we could manage an interview. I didn’t...
There is a tower of books beside my bed. I just finished rereading Krakauer’s: Into Thin Air, the story of the disastrous 1996 Mount Everest climb. I had read it when it first came out. I was, so judgmental! I was certain that I would have gone looking for the missing...
I have this community. It’s not a group anyone would join willingly. But, it is a group I see every week. There’s age range and a mix of male and female. There’s a group leader. We talk and talk and sometimes we leave uplifted and sometimes we leave feeling worse than...
