“Memory is the scribe of the soul.”
– Aristotle
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…
We can’t know everything. But we can yearn to learn more. I recently learned of Mr. Lewis Howard Latimer—an inventor, writer, and leader. Born in Massachusetts in 1848, he was the youngest son of slaves who escaped from Norfolk, Virginia, near my hometown. His family decided to split up and scatter to protect itself from…
In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this year, I am re-reading King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I’m haunted by his words. Most of us came to admire King for his oratory skills. But King’s superpower was his wordcraft, wielding prose as a sword or a torch or a paintbrush, rendering a better…
