Magical Memoir Moments
A Powerful Stimulant to Memoir: Crayola Memories Past and Future
A new box of Crayolas — is anything more beautiful? Those perfect points. The swoon-inducing fragrance! When I was a child, I craved the box of 64 I saw inside the desk of one of my first-grade friends. I loved the varied hues and the strange names: vermillion, burnt umber, magenta. I got one or…
Mennonite Dancing! It Ain't Pretty, But that's Okay
Mennonite prohibitions included dancing, television, and movies. When my gym teacher taught a class unit on dancing, I had to turn in a note sent by my mother excusing me for religious reasons. Those classes spent with one other lonely Mennonite classmate on the wooden bleachers were some of the longest fifty minutes in high…
A Lancaster County Wedding: Celebration of Faith, Family, Friendship, and Farming
Our niece Valerie, the youngest of my mother’s grandchildren, married her sweetheart Nate yesterday. The whole family labored for months to restore an old mill to a usable space, mow the grass, pump out the overflow from the creek, pick the flowers for centerpieces, put up and take down chairs, tent, and then get dressed…
Wholeheartedness: The Way to Make a New Beginning
Yesterday we talked about Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability. Her word for the people who have embraced vulnerability with courage, is “wholeheartedness.” I hope your New Beginnings give you greater, and more whole, heart. If you need a little extra heart today, just take a look at my grandson Owen on this picture. He’s…
Learning from a Baby: A Memoir Writer’s Teacher
I was a baby once. Now I’m a grandma learning to write about childhood while holding my grandson.I remember Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Mortality” (1803) Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in…
Dancing with Change, Part Three: Gramps and Granny Nanny Leave for the Big Apple
In a few days, Stuart and I will move a second time in less than seven months! Our journey has taken us from the Midwest to the South to the Northeast. By the end of this week, we will be living in a Brooklyn highrise. And by August 1, we will be sharing a new…
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