Month: September 1999

With our sons spread out from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Michigan we cannot simply go and help every time they have a problem. I don’t like that, but it does have it advantages. Take the month of August — please. Our youngest son decided to settle in St. Louis after his summer job…

For months I had dreamed of spending a lot of time with our granddaughter in Indiana. I especially wanted the fun of making bread with them. Bread making is such a gooey, tasty mess with satisfactory, immediate results. I began our recent Saturday visit insisting that before we went visiting my husband and our Indiana…

My English ancestors knew it might be more than a year before they heard that their loved ones arrived in the colonies of New England. My father’s parents expected us to call regularly when we moved from New York to Arizona. With a severely limited budget my parents supplemented phone calls with letters. For my…

The story is told of a family who stopped to ask directions to Niagara Falls from a man who lived near the falls. “Are they as spectacular as everyone says?” the visitors asked. The man scratched his head, “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.” That man does not live at my house. Several years…

A lot of people asked me this summer: “What will you do when your daughter goes off to college this fall? All of your children will be gone.” My answer was always, “my daughter has been preparing us for her departure since March when she began working after school. All this summer she has worked…