I Hope You Ate Your Black-eyed Peas

Oh my stars! It is New Year’s Day, and I realized I did not have any black-eyed peas; and I am not referring to the hip hop group. No, I mean the simple, tried and true legume. I needed to get to the grocery store, pronto, but could not until it warmed up enough for […]

Life In The Time Of Cruising

December days in California’s San Joaquin Valley are cold, overcast, and often foggy. Tule fog, foggy. That is the fog where visibility can go from 600 feet to zero feet with little or no warning; there just is no way of knowing where it is going to be at its worst, and danger is the […]

Just What She Always Never Wanted

When we look back on Christmases past, we like to remember gifts received, especially those cherished items that we have held close to our hearts for a lifetime. But there also were those gifts we remember; the ones which made us shudder, shed a disappointed tear, or for one poor woman, hide in my closet […]

“A Date Which Will Live In Infamy”

My dad never spoke of his service to our country. In her gravest tone of voice, my mother taught us at an early age to never, ever ask him about the Navy, or World War II, or Pearl Harbor. And so we did not. The only clue I had growing up was when my dad […]

The Christmas Culprit Came Clean

My mother and I were sitting together in her room, talking about Christmases past, and I finally confessed to, and explained our longtime family mystery of misplaced toys. And when I say misplaced, I do not mean lost. I mean a toy that started out in one child’s pile of toys under the Christmas tree, […]