Years ago I owned a vintage clothing business. Every Friday morning I hit estate sales looking for charming pieces of pre-worn clothing I could repair, launder, and market.  With fellow entrepreneurs and wacky die-hard collectors, I waited hours in line before dawn for a snapshot of 20th century… Read full post »

Glen Smalley died on the bedroom floor of a Kansas farm house on the fifth of December, 1918.  It was a historically mild and dry Kansas winter following an exceptionally bitter and cold 1917.   A new father and a strapping, handsome man, Glen was twenty one years old.  In the sum/… Read full post »

My 1948 version of the Culinary Arts Institute’s Encyclopedic Cookbook sports a worn yellow leather cover badly in need of book tape.   A gift to me from a dear friend ten years ago this month, the book features charming graphics and plucky mid century prose.   &nb… Read full post »

I abandon my children to a completely inappropriate or unsafe situation in a recurring dream I had for many years.   Always given to vivid dreaming, I was pregnant with my first child and learned at the ultrasound I was expecting a girl when this particular version first visited me. &n… Read full post »

I purchased the antique albumin hand-tinted photograph of Mrs. Wilmarth after an August visit to the Maine seacoast.   The image depicts a woman in a Victorian era walking skirt and crisp white blouse seated on the jagged rocks along the Marginal Way—a shore-hugging footpath in Ogunqu… Read full post »

On the day the music returned, I drove myself to work as usual, steering my car into the seedy wasteland underneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  To save $9 in parking, I stepped gingerly over the broken wine bottle shards and walked the mile into downtown.  

I do not recall… Read full post »

I watched her climb on hands and knees through her overflowing back bedroom closet, digging for a special item.   “I’m cleaning things out and I want you to have these!” she declared and handed to me a beautifully tooled pair of vintage Western boots.   

W… Read full post »

Many years ago in the back yard of the first home I owned, near an old cherry tree, I buried my dog.   The spot is marked only by a small chunk of stone.

This past fall our family purchased a beautiful, big, and old crooked home with the space we… Read full post »

As my fortieth birthday approached, my grandmother gifted me a coat that I had admired since childhood. This particular coat always hung in the back hallway closet of my grandparents house, brushing the top of a long stowed-away canister Electrolux. It is a knee length,… Read full post »

My children haven't slept apart in the four years since their dad left.

They will not stop talking and arguing when it is bed time.  Several nights per week I find myself screeching from the living room, "ONE MORE TIME AND I WILL SEPARATE YOU!" And then comes… Read full post »