Circuitous. It’s a cool word. Dennis used it one day and I had to look it up. (He has a Master’s degree and I don’t.) Anyway, I like the word but I haven’t found a good way to use it in ordinary conversation. But I will use it here to impress my readers as I […]
It’s October 5th as I begin writing this – my mother’s birthday. Though she’s been gone for over 20 years I still think of her often and especially on this day. My mother was a plainspoken, simple lady. Not simple as in not smart, but simple as in she wasn’t complicated. No pretense. No frills. […]
It’s a sign of the times. A few nights ago, I was out on our deck looking at a bright crescent moon with my granddaughter, Brileigh, age 4. I said, “Look at the moon. Isn’t it beautiful?” She looked for a moment and answered, “Yeah, but where’s the little boy that sits in the moon […]
Geneva, Alabama, my hometown, sits at the junction of two rivers so the surrounding earth is one of the last stops for sediment deposits before the rivers flow into the Gulf of Mexico. The soil underneath the whole town is mostly hard, dense red clay. Our street wasn’t paved for most of my growing up […]
If our family is together in a public place and a child is misbehaving, chances are one of us will turn to the others and say, “Looks like somebody needs a ham sandwich.” If you’re within earshot and don’t know the story behind this statement, you would think us crazy. So here’s the story: When […]
Miss Mary Dell Ard was my fourth grade teacher. She was an old-fashioned schoolmarm. Never married, she dedicated her life to teaching children. She called every student “precious” even though she may be at the same time applying the rod to the child’s backside. Her oak desk was huge (at least it was to this […]
Who would dare drive directly into the path of a hurricane? WE WOULD! Last Wednesday with Isaac bearing down on the Florida Gulf Coast we packed up the babies (and their parents) into a rented van, and headed toward an active Category 1 hurricane. Hey, we had booked the house and the van months before […]
We all have rocks in our heads. Really. Deep inside our heads, in our inner ears, we have tubes (or canals) and in those tubes there are tiny calcium crystals (sometimes called “ear rocks”) that communicate with our brains – telling us that we are upright, lying down, falling down, upside down, or whatever. But […]
Imagine our surprise. After a few seconds driving our rental car through the gates of the walled Italian city San Gimignano, we realized that the ancient cobble stone streets were meant for pedestrians only. Yeah, there were probably signs somewhere that forbade vehicles from driving on these historic pathways but my Italian was marginal at […]
The closest I’ve ever gotten physically (or emotionally) to Bimini is when we took a weeklong trip to Nassau in the Bahamas. A few years ago both sons and their wives were living on opposite ends of the country from each other…and us. Los Angeles and New York City. We are in Nashville. Dennis and […]