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You know the familiar crunch when you pick up the mail in December. All those holiday cards are full of more than good cheer. The cloud of glitter is inescapable. I find few things more annoying than glitter, unless “It’s Christmas Time All over the World” a song recorded by Sammy Davis, Jr. with a cutesy kids’ chorus. That song …
A while back I found myself rifling through my accordion file of recipes to find directions for making Autumn Fruit Salad. I have it in my bag of tricks for crowd-pleasers—a dish that’s a really dessert disguised as salad. Of course it was in the last place I looked, but as I weeded through clippings and handwritten notes, I decided …
Poor Thanksgiving! Like a middle child, it languishes between two legendary partiers: Halloween and Christmas. Thanksgiving can scarcely compete. American history teaches us that in 1621 the Plymouth Colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared the first Thanksgiving feast together to celebrate the harvest. Well, actually it was a three-day celebration But don’t tell that to the docents at Berkeley Plantation in …
Is there anything more annoying than Daylight Savings Time? I woke up Sunday to realize that the rest of the world had fallen back and left me behind, or ahead, or…whatever. My dogs, meanwhile, operate on the sun and belly time: when the sun comes up, it’s time to fill their bellies. After tending to breakfast, I spent the next …
Sept. 5 was a day I hoped would never come. That Thursday, my husband Tym died. Over the course of a year, he had experienced a progressive weakness and shortness of breath. He lost a lot of weight. There was no diagnosis until Aug. 28, when we learned that he had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. Since there’s no cure, …
For those of you who haven’t traded for a new vehicle lately, I have news for you: There are no CD players. Zero. Zip. Nada. I learned this ugly truth last fall after purchasing a new Equinox and transferred my paraphernalia to the new vehicle. Sadly, there was no need to move my CD collection because Chevrolet discontinued CD players …
Many of you know that Tym and I aren’t from around here. We grew up in Shelby County, Illinois, a farming community halfway up the trunk of Illinois. Leaving family behind in your home state means the burden of visiting has always been on us—the leavers, not the leavees. Let’s say we’ve come to know the road well: 40 West …
Yes, it’s true. My great-grandmother Sarah McGuirk was an orphan sent by rail from New York City to live with a farm family in Piatt County, IL in 1860. I’ll be talking about her Wednesday, Aug. 14 at the Museum of History in downtown Newton. The Newcomers of Catawba County have invited me to present my talk as a Road …
If there’s one thing writers like to do, it’s talk. All those hours of solitude leave us hungry for live dialog. That was evident at a recent writers’ conference in Virginia. I had breakfast with two strangers—a man from Philadelphia and a woman from Roanoke, VA. Of course the topic came around to—what else—politics. I expressed was how unpleasant—maybe dangerous—it …
The chance of losing something is directly proportional to its value. Say you have a $50 bill and the picture of a $50 bill on a piece of junk mail. Which one do you think will get lost? OK, it wasn’t actual money. It was a $25 gift certificate printed from the Blue Cross/Blue Shield website. I printed out the …