As we finish up the first week of December, the sudden appearance of Christmas trees is pleasantly common. Some folks put theirs up over Thanksgiving weekend – or even before. Others wait till closer to the big day. Mom loved everything about Christmas, but waited until the night before for the tree. Although Dad usually picked out their live Christmas trees over the years – and placed the lights, she was in charge of the decorating of each season’s beauty….
Do teachers still send home a “reading list” with students over their summer break? I seem to remember a few lists coming home in the boys’ backpacks over the years, but never one as intimidating as this. Mom was an incoming freshman at Saint Joseph College the fall of 1948. As an English major, she was expected to read a lot. She wrote to her future husband (she and Dad had dated since they met at age 14 and were…
This year, Thanksgiving falls on the third anniversary of Mom’s passing. Anyone who’s grieved a loved one’s death knows the sadness is unpredictable. Sometimes it sneaks in with a sigh; other times it clobbers you like a mallet and takes your breath away. But you learn, bit by bit, to “carry on” and do your best. And so I dug around this week for a Thanksgiving poem, knowing how Mom loved the holiday and the gathering of family and friends….
It’s been exactly 155 years since a wee fellow named Joseph Malachy Regan was born in Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland. Although I’ve blogged about him several times already, it seems only right to let his youngest daughter, Cecelia, have her say. Grandma was crazy about her father. She was the only one of the Regan girls to marry, and he gave her away in full regalia: Thanks to my middle brother, Dave, who was working on a…
This postcard is nearly a century old. Postage was a one-cent Benjamin Franklin stamp. The cancellation mark includes not only the date, but also time of day. It was sent from Milford, Connecticut, to New Haven. A young father on religious retreat dashed off a note to his first born. The postcard was cancelled at 3:30pm on July 8, 1931. A Wednesday. On the back, Grandpa wrote this note to Mom, his toddler daughter: “Be a good girl, and be…
This is a story that took 46 years to tell. The year was 1976 and our family lived in Carmel, Indiana. This was a tough time in my mom’s life, what with living in the Midwest (so very far from New England) since 1973, two of her four children off to college (I was to follow that fall), and the confusion of the burgeoning women’s movement. One bright light was the writers’ conferences she attended and the friendships she cultivated…
My middle brother, Dave, wove together this remembrance of family and friends returning to Madison a few months ago to honor Dad’s memory in a heartfelt Celebration of Life: On June 11, about 40 family members and friends gathered at my parents’ spiritual home, St. Margaret’s Catholic Church in Madison, Connecticut. Dad had passed away in April of the previous year, before the risks COVID posed had diminished significantly, and this had limited the number of people who attended his…
When I picked up a century-old cookbook we’d brought home from my parents’ house and saw it was published by a baking powder company, I could hear one thing. It was Dad’s voice from the 1970s: “Keep your powder dry!” as he tried to calm whatever situation was erupting in our house full of teens. When I mentioned this to Farmer Gary, he quickly explained the source: “Actually, that’s a reference to gunpowder.” Indeed, it’s credited to Oliver Cromwell, advising…
The weather was so warm over the weekend. And then, around two o’clock this morning, a wild storm brought winter back. Ah, well. Guess we’ll just have to wait. Perhaps there were similarly fluid weather conditions when Mom wrote this sonnet, called “Waiting Is Winter,” in April of 1949, while a freshman at Saint Joseph College. (You remember sonnets, right? Traditionally, a sonnet is a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter. It follows a specific rhyming pattern and focuses on…
I’m not sure exactly when I realized my parents were born just a year after Anne Frank. History can be confusing that way. World War II and the Holocaust seemed so long ago and far away when we studied it in high school. In actuality, only three decades had passed. As saber rattling sets the world on edge once again, I came across a journal Mom kept from 1944 through 1948, her high school years. In total, 65 poems. Here…