I hadn’t even heard of Hurricane Helene until a few days before it hit. That’s unusual. Normally, there is a week or more of weather reports saying something is developing somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean that may turn into a tropical storm or a full-fledged hurricane. We always pay attention to hurricane news, even though we live so far inland in Georgia that hurricanes usually don’t affect us directly. There have been some exceptions, of course, such as Hurricane Irma, which left us without power [...]
During a visit with our daughter eight years ago, conversation turned to the coming election, and inspired a tongue-in-cheek column in which I appointed members of my family—myself included—to different government positions. Some of what I said is as relevant today as it was then, so I’m printing it again. I hope you enjoy it. The Department of Nice. That’s the federal agency I’m going to be in charge of after my daughter is elected president. My husband and I spent last weekend in Florida, [...]
Labor Day weekend is here. I no longer look at it as the end of the summer season, but as the start of the season of transitions. Kids and their parents are transitioning from summer to school. Depending on where you live, the weather is transitioning from unbearably hot and humid to—well, a little less so. And soon it will transition to comfortable, then to cool, to chilly, to cold, and finally to downright frigid. Trees start transitioning from their summer greenery to a more [...]
“I feel like I’m in a Norman Rockwell painting,” I said. The lady behind the counter, the one dishing out homemade peach ice cream, laughed. “Boy, that brings back memories,” she said. I was at an Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Social sponsored by Eatonton’s Old School History Museum, whose tag line is “Preserving the past for the future.” When I first got to the event, I said hello to a friend who was handing out lemonade near the front door of the building. “Did you get [...]
Although we’ve been home for a few weeks now, I’m still humming the Simon & Garfunkel song that starts out, “Gee but it’s great to be back home.” After three weeks on the road and almost 4,000 miles on the odometer, it was, indeed, great to be back home. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. In the three weeks we were gone, my husband and I visited with family in Chicago and Minnesota, then drove down to Dallas for a convention, and finally [...]
It’s time for a summer break, and I’ll be taking a few weeks off from writing my blog. I hope you are able to stay cool in the sweltering heat of this summer. Have a wonderful 4th of July holiday, and please stay safe!
I had numerous feelings of déjà vu recently when my husband and I flew to Phoenix. From there we rented a car and drove to California to visit our daughter, then back to Phoenix to visit some friends there that we haven’t seen in a long, long time. The déjà vu kept popping up because this was the same itinerary we had last November, when we had to cancel our plans after learning that a tree fell on our house and punched a hole in [...]
It’s been seven years since my husband and I moved to Georgia from Minnesota. The first summer we were here, both of our kids and their spouses came to visit over the 4th of July, and we all had a great time. In fact, our son said, “I know where we’ll be going every year for our summer vacation.” It didn’t turn out that way, however. By the next summer, our daughter-in-law was pregnant, and long-distance travel would have been uncomfortable at best. By the [...]