This morning, July 4, 2023, as I was cleaning up the kitchen, my local music station, WEMC, was playing Charles Ives’ “Variations on America.” It reminded me of an evening dinner cruise Wayne and I took on the Mississippi River in 2014. We were on our way home from visiting a dear friend in Rapid…

A pilgrimage is not a sightseeing trip, although one may see many things that prompt reflection. It is not a mission trip focused on helping others, although one may return ready to serve in new ways. It is not a class for learning new facts and figures, although learning of that kind may happen. A…

We didn’t know it would become that when we started. It was just our fourth “cousins’ trip” organized by my cousin Doug, the youngest of my Lehman cousins. He loves to travel and apparently loves to do it, even with relatives. Our first trip took place twenty years ago—a trip to Paris to celebrate Wayne…

Aunt Velma concluded her story, “So, for years I kept that pistol hidden in my lingerie drawer.” This comment startled me. It was not something that I would ever have imagined coming from her, a person whose life centered around a pacifist church, one who had prayed for the Japanese children during WW II. She…

(My dear Aunt Velma died two weeks ago. She was my father’s youngest sister, just thirteen years older than me, and one of my favorite aunts. She was a master storyteller, never passing up the opportunity to tell us nieces and nephews another story. The one below moved me so deeply I felt compelled to…

(Note: If you missed my previous November 19 post, “Lullabies,” it might be helpful to begin with that before moving on to this one.) “Thank you for singing me to sleep last night,” I said to my California daughter-in-law the morning after she and her two children arrived at our house the week before Christmas.…

Part I I’ve been catching up on some podcasts from the past, and the other day I listened to an episode of “We Made you a Song” by The Steel Wheels. The person for whom the song was written in this episode requested a lullaby. She described singing to a child at bedtime as a…

This chapter didn’t make it into my memoir, even though it was one of my favorites. It holds happy and satisfying memories that make me wish I could sneak back into the past for an afternoon—to sit and watch Grandma iron and listen to her stories. Maybe ask her a few questions I didn’t know…

(Note: I wrote this seven years ago, shortly after the Memorial Day weekend when this event took place. We still lived in Manassas at that time. The new inhabitants of Rosa’s house were close family friends of hers, and by extension had become our friends as well.) Rosa and I were the only two people…

One of the people I think of on Mother’s Day is Rosa. For twenty-four of the years we lived in Manassas, she was my next-door neighbor. Our backgrounds were very different. She was of French Huguenot ancestry, grew up Methodist, and converted to the Catholicism of her husband. There were political issues on which we…