Location/occasion: Late summer of 1998, Branbury State Park, Vt., – between Brandon and Middlebury, in case you’re curious, or have ever been there. Car camping. Husband: bad knees, needs electricity or at least a car battery to run the machine to help him breathe at night, but eager to see (and show the kids) the […]
Jennifer Loyal readers of the blog may think I’ve forgotten that I already wrote about calling the young man who killed my grandmother in a car accident, but this is a different grandmother and different phone call. *************** My mother should have realized by December ’87 that there was an important reason she had been […]
Jennifer We had the funeral for my aunt Beatrice . The funeral seemed to be exactly what a Catholic funeral ought to be. After the funeral, one sister, one daughter, and I returned to the house to resume the sorting-and-taking-stock task. Around dinner time, a girl appeared who had just learned of Beatrice’s death that […]
From Nancy Tomlinson Hall Rice’s (Jennifer’s mother) Senior Paper, October, 1952 Well, so perhaps my need to write, up through my freshman year in college, can be attributed simply to the fact that I wanted to be like my mother, and was copying those things which seemed to be important to her, without having any […]
Jennifer Elsie called this morning, worried because she hadn’t heard from my Aunt Beatrice in a long time. She had last gotten through to Beatrice by phone in early February. Beatrice has often been hard to reach; she leaves her phone off the hook when she writes, and maybe at other times as well. But […]
Poem written by Jennifer’s mother. Photograph of Jennifer’s grandmother. View larger image January, February, March, April Christmas was one of the times to be born: Christmas or January, the Christmas mothers having quickened to the call of spring more urgently, put out their shoots like indoors plants in the pull of the early sun, before […]
Jennifer When my grandmother died in a two car accident at around age 75, my family was pretty convinced that she had desired her death, and I decided that the uninjured teenage driver of the other car deserved to know that. My family agreed, and (partly since it was my idea, and partly since I […]
Jennifer My daughter at college was on my mind after the blog about what people have read. (I canÃt deal with reading any of the recommended reading though.) I was thinking about sharing some of our important early read-alouds: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Mary Poppins (the BOOKS, *N*O*T* the movie!), and The Jungle Book. […]
Jennifer I tend to have nightmares about school especially in the week before school starts in the fall, a day or two before every vacation ends, and on long weekends. This is from before the end of our last vacation. I was in my classroom (which was a lecture-hall), and I didnÃt have much for […]