Facing Accidents on the Prairies Long Ago By Carole Koch Prologue: We are used to viewing the homesteading of prairies in a broad perspective. We state facts — who, when, where, what and how, but ignore the drama within the heart and soul of these real human beings. We skim over the cost to the […]

Memoir About A Photograph: Mom, Dad, and Intricate Pillars By Peggy Freeburg My parents are sitting on the front porch of the house in South Dakota where I spent the first 17 years of my life. Their hair is still black, so I must have been very small. I only remember them as my dad […]

Christmases Remembered By Marie Robinson (11/29/00) Say Christmas to children and you turn on their dreams, light up their eyes and put hope in their hearts. Say Christmas to adults and they check their bank accounts, wonder what to get their spouses, and hope the inlaws won’t stay too long. But we all have dreams, […]

Reflections on a Career: “The Big City” By Anna Belle Staley (Chapter 3 of the memoirs of Anna Belle Staley, Renton, Washington) September of 1943 found me eagerly awaiting the experience of becoming a part of the Seattle Schools. At that time, all teachers in the system met at either a high school or what […]

My Crow, Jim By Jo Hintz (March 2002) When I was 12 or 13, I owned a very beloved and special pet: my crow, Jim. Capturing him just exactly at the right time, nurturing and guiding him through “chickhood,” a testy adolescence, and an early adulthood took dedication to task and acknowledgment of the brilliance […]

Crayon Magic By Lona Jennings I always have a box of crayons in my house. A lot of people do, either for their kids or their grandkids, and they probably keep some coloring books too, but I live in suburban Seattle and my grandkids live on the other side of the United States in Pennsylvania. […]

The Jaunty Lady Decorator By Jean Nadeau Over the years I was the decorator of our home. Understand of course, that decorating meant painting each room or moving the furniture around as my spirit dictated. The only painting at our house was that done by me — except for the living room because of the […]

Shine Mister By Arnold Guadalupe I was on my way home from seeing a movie in Times Square with Joe Diaz, my stepdad when, at the entrance to the subway station, we spotted a gang of young boys, all about my age, ten to eleven years old. They had shoe-shine boxes and were shining the […]

Old Fashioned Holiday Dinners By Barbara Mattos I don’t remember having turkey for Thanksgiving when I was young, probably because we didn’t raise turkeys on our little acreage in Idaho. My parents were very frugal, and we ate what we raised. As I have written before, my mother was quite family oriented. Two of her […]

Turkey-less Thanksgiving in the ‘30s Phyllis Mitchell At our one-room rural school in mid-November, our Halloween wiener roast was a fading memory, and the window decorations of black cats and pumpkins had been removed. “It will be a long time before Christmas,” I thought. The doldrums between holidays soon ended though when Miss Cecil announced, […]

Thanksgiving By Jim York One of the perks I was privileged to experience while in the active ministry was to have delivered to our door, at Thanksgiving time, a frozen turkey. It was always a surprise when this occurred, even though it happened often enough that it would not be out of the ordinary for […]