“Memory is the scribe of the soul.”
– Aristotle
The Christmas spirit is a funny and ephemeral thing. Sometimes it’s found in the twinkling lights, sometimes at the Santa visit, and sometimes at the table while eyeing the Christmas turkey. In our family, it showed up through the gifts and yes, there was a special tradition attached (of course). Our family always attempted to…
Chocolate on my shirt and a melting candy bar in my hand. I’d made a mess, and I hate messes, plus I’d been caught wiping that chocolate onto my clean, white shirt. As a firstborn, my mother supposedly kept me ultra clean, whisking me away from the slightest mess to put me into another outfit…
My mother knew how to make every holiday (and every day) special. Often, in college when I was stressed about exams or boys or other high-priority college stressors, my mother would come to town and take me on a pumpkin hunting trip. This was a great distraction technique (on which she should have written a…
I’m a bit haunted by Mother’s Day—a difficult day for me at times. Over the past decade or so, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am now motherless and am myself a child-free adult (that’s a fancy new term I just learned this week!). Both facts can be a source of some…
There were some interesting Easter traditions in my house as I was growing up. Yes, we got the chocolate-filled baskets with a years’ worth of M&Ms just beneath the grass. Yes, we got the chocolate bunny which we either crunched off the head immediately or saved for last—depending upon our age and relative spunk. Yes,…
As we wind down this month of March, also known as the National Woman’s History Month, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ida B. Wells. She was a woman to remember. Born into slavery in 1862 in Holly Springs Mississippi, she lost her parents to the yellow fever epidemic in 1878 and became the sole…
