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…
January was a good month for reading books. A very good month. Farmer Gary and I enjoyed a couple of overnights with grandson Cameron, who was delighted to write up the following after he and I finished reading Stuart Little together: Bonus Book: Stuart Little by E. B. White A mouse of adventures, Stuart Little is a brave mouse, always thinking of ideas, and has cool adventures. One weird thing is that he was born by a family of humans…
Mom’s cousin Patty sent me a wonderful photo via email this week. The (unfortunately) undated photo shows their Aunt Marguerite (a nun my generation knew as Sister Amabilis) outside with a group of children, looking at a birdhouse. No doubt they were her students, as Sr. Amabilis taught first grade for 58 years. (That’s right – nearly six decades!) Mom adored her aunt, and wrote to her regularly. Sr. Amabilis saved the letters all those years and they were eventually…
Another mystery. This time, contained in a letter. As I’ve shuffled through hundreds of letters saved from the late 1940s and early ’50s, I’ve noticed Dad calls Grandma Cassidy (his mother-in-law) “Joe.” Thing is, her name wasn’t Josephine. It was Cecelia. Cecelia Margaret Regan Cassidy. And when she wrote to Dad, she signed the letters “Joe.” I wonder why … … maybe she worried that the other soldiers stationed in Korea might take a peek at one of the letters…
The year 1953 was a tough one for Mom. She was a newlywed, but her dear Hap was overseas, serving in the Army during the Korean Conflict. In one of her daily letters to Dad, she proclaimed, “After you get home, I don’t ever want to see a stamp again!” Of course, anyone who knew her is chuckling right now; Mom was a true and faithful letter-writer. She stayed in touch. So imagine her heartbreak when one of her favorite…
Growing up as a Catholic kid, it was confusing. Probably exacerbated by the sugar hangover from Halloween. The Sisters at Sacred Heart School would test us: What. Comes. Next? Well, there was All Saints Day and All Souls Day, but in what order? (I got crafty one year and noticed they were alphabetical.) Good heavens, no wonder we were confused. Here’s what Wikipedia says: All Saints’ Day, also known as All Hallows’ Day, the Feast of All Saints, the Feast of All Hallows, the Solemnity of All…
Among the many trunks and boxes of Mom’s poetry, prose, and other papers, a Halloween story surfaced this week. The one-page spooky story looks to be a theme paper written for a high school class. Young Joan Cassidy typed it carefully; she was a student of New Haven’s St. Mary’s Academy. Associates in Magic My buck-toothed product of the harvest grinned maliciously in the kitchen window. His crooked nose and glaring eyes made him appear utterly ridiculous. I attempted futilely…
Back in June, as Gary and I cleared out my parents’ home for sale, I phoned my cousin Suzanne about one particular wooden chair. “The chair with the lions. That was from Grandma and Grandpa’s house, right Suzie?” You mean the Frankenchair? Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized the chair in my folks’ music room had a story behind it. Our grandpa was a policeman in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1926 through 1952. He loved to walk the beat…