Category: Essays

My small office was beside the door to the Senior Center Parlor, not far from the Dining Room.  Close by, I’d added a bulletin board for upcoming event flyers, the month’s birthday list, reminders of…

Christmas, 1972, my Mother gave me a copy of the Granddaughters’ Inglenook Cookbook, recipes from Brethren women collected over the previous 200 years—traditionally presented by the McPherson Church to its new brides.  I was 26,…

Dave ended every day at his desk in our basement on Choteau.  He’d built it to his own dimensions—too big to ever leave the house—and painted it brown.  A color Em and Amanda were quick…

In 2005, the last August of Dave’s life, we spent a precious week to ourselves at his family’s property on the North Fork of the Flathead River.  Precious because it was joyfully ordinary.   I did…

In 1960, freshman civics students at McPherson High had to write a “what I want to be when I grow up” paper.  Easy.  I liked history.  I was girl.  I didn’t want to type insurance…

I was old before I realized the travesty I’d played in my brief career on stage. It was McPherson 1960 and our junior high 8th grade musical. About gypsies. No not THE Gypsy. No not…

I thought they were a tour group granted special privileges to board our plane first.  They wore identical scarves and chattered in bunches as they bypassed the rope corridors the rest of us would traverse.  …

It began, in my remembering, in four a.m. dark on muggy summer mornings that left us damp and chilled before Sonja and I ever settled into the back seat of our second-hand black coupe. Half…