When we kids were young, we called her Auntie (pronounced “Ain’t-ee”) Myrtle, even though we lived in California and didn’t use a “Southern accent” on any other words. She was my mama’s big sister. Mom was the baby of 3 girls born and raised in rural Arkansas, and Aunt Myrtle was the oldest. The house…
“Shoo, bear!” It was the middle of the night in Yosemite Valley, and my two sisters and I were blissfully snoozing away in our tent-trailer, hoping the raccoons didn’t come again. They had been trying to steal our food and making a mess of our campsite every night. So when we heard rattling and banging…
DETOUR! Did anyone else besides me just break into that catchy old tune, 🎶“Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead, detour!” No? Well, I grew up with two older sisters and a brother, and our family did a fair bit of Sunday driving (back when Sunday drives were a thing), not to mention driving across the state or…
When I was a kid, my grandparents lived in the San Joaquin Valley in California. Our family of 6 lived in lots of different places while I was growing up. We moved north from the Bay Area to as far as Portland and then west to Nebraska. But we would come to the San Joaquin…
It’s a fun fact that in British English (that seems a rather redundant phrase, but you know what I mean…), the letter Z is pronounced “Zed” rather than “Zee.” I’ve never been able to figure out why they have a whole word for just that one letter. It’s also the only letter in the English…
So there we were just outside Virginia City a few years ago, minding our own business, when I looked up and saw a big blue police box. Of course I had to check it out. It was locked, but i can tell you it was bigger on the inside than on the outside. I only…
Do you love to color? Have you discovered how relaxing it can be? When I started drawing coloring pages and books, it was a way for me to share my art with more people than just the fam. But once I got into it, I realized what a great stress reliever it was! I just…
How long has it been since you laughed out loud? I’m talking the big, carefree, embarrass-your-friends-and-family kind of belly laugh that makes you feel like a toddler caught in the middle of a playful pile of puppies. The kind that makes tears of mirth roll down your cheeks and sometimes makes you gasp for breath….
“Auntie’s here,” my sweet little granddaughter said excitedly when I opened the door to her knock last week. I tried to make sense of what she said, because that just didn’t compute. “Auntie” is a resident physician living and working 3,000 miles away. But when I asked my granddaughter if she was saying that she…
As I’ve said in other posts (here and also here), I just love words. I love to read them, I love to play with them, I love to learn new words, I love to learn that I’ve mispronounced something my whole life (okay I don’t love that one quite as much 😜, but I’m glad to…