Category Archives: Family Fortune

“Why are you always doing dishes,” my granddaughter asks. Because they’re there. Because if I don’t, who will? Because I was blessed with the responsibility gene? Because by now–decades into my dish washing career–it’s pretty much a knee-jerk response. Because warm soapy water comforts. Because doing dishes clears a space for “what’s next.” Because momentsContinue reading “Rudely interrupted by a tomato worm”

If any part of the house had a right to cry, “Me, me, fix me,” it was the porch . . . But the comfortable little maple porch rocker with its rush-woven seat and gently curved ladder back, proved a faithful friend.

Each Sunday night in 1963, when Judy Garland sang to a live TV audience, she sang to me, too, just a kid in my pajamas taking in one last TV show before bedtime. Week after week, I watched her nod and blink and run her fingers wildly through her hair. She’d wind the microphone cordContinue reading “Onstage: Judy, Hoover, and me”

Daddy and daughter forever: blessed.

I wanted to know the expert technique of applying mascara in front of a locker-room mirror to impress some boy in math class. God had something else in mind . . .

Well, just about everything. Whenever I pass a Kubota tractor dealership, I think of my dad. He never owned a Kubota. Kubota was just one detail from a greater conversation we shared on a pleasant day at a tractor show during the last year of his life. At 88, he possessed a sharp mind andContinue reading “What’s Kubota got to do with it?”

Then he flew north, past where the houses ended . . . past the trailer park and the hill someone said was an Indian burial ground, past places he had known only through a car window . . .