Memories
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Sunday Snippet: The French Butter Edition
I love French butter. We discovered it in Paris, naturally enough, and it’s perfect butter. Creamy and delicious with just the right touch of salt. We ate it on croissants at the little café around the corner from our apartment and on crusty baguettes from the boulangerie next to the laverie (laundromat). It was sheer paradis sur terre (heaven on Earth). I’d never really appreciated butter of any kind before that trip to Paris because my mom bought margarine and that’s what I grew up on. My grandmother had butter at her house and I recall thinking it tasted…oily. And because the size of my butt has been an issue my…
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Sunday Snippet: The Mother’s Day Edition
It’s Mother’s Day. About every seven years or so, my mom’s birthday, which is May 13, lands on Mother’s Day Sunday. Not this year and honestly, I’m glad. The bittersweet of that convergence of memory-inducing events is enough to put me into a fetal position in the corner. There are days even after 33 years–dear lord, Mom has been gone 33 years!–that I miss my mother so much I ache with it. Not because she and I were all that close when I became an adult because we weren’t really. What I miss is my mommy. The woman who read to me endlessly, even when she was exhausted from working…
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Sunday Snippet–The Post-Holiday Version
I’m tired. The holidays were lovely, if odd for not doing all the usual stuff like baking for friends and neighbors and spending a cookie-baking day with my sis, lunch with Liz, shopping in an actual store, doing Christmas Eve chicken-and-noodles and Candlelight service with my family and Christmas day with all the Reinhardts in the same room, but now…well, I’m tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally exhausted. I’ve currently got a butt load of work and I need to get back on my morning writing schedule. To that end, I’m going to take a social media break for a while, so if you want me, email me or text me or…
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Sunday Snippet, the Post-Thanksgiving Version
After a lazy morning, during which we decorated our Christmas tree, we went to the kids’ on Friday afternoon to help them with their outdoor decorations, then stayed to watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, which I had never seen before. It was charming. Michael Caine was a wonderful Ebenezer Scrooge. We paused midway to catch the lighting of the Circle of Lights in downtown Indy. All of us were teary when Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Pops director, Jack Everly, appeared with some of the people who participate in Yuletide, reading “The Night Before Christmas.” We are devoted Yuletiders, and it was both lovely and wrenching to see him and all the folks…
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Sunday Snippet
Can you believe it’s Sunday again? Yeah, neither can I. This week passed so quickly as writing, editing gigs, and fall yard clean-up were on tap for me. My Sunday Snippet today is actually a recommendation–if you have access to the Hallmark channels, watch Jingle Bell Bride! If you don’t have access, read on…I can help! I was also soooo excited that my fellow Tule Author Scarlett Wilson’s holiday romance Jingle Bell Bride was going to kick off the new Hallmark Countdown to Christmas! However, I had no way to watch it since Husband and I opted out of signing up for a cable service when we moved into our…
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Celebrating Mom’s Way
I was just in the kitchen putting baked beans together and it occurred to me how much of my Mom’s way of doing things I’ve brought to my own adulthood. Like, for instance, baked beans. Mother was always horrified at the idea of dumping a can of baked beans into a pot and warming it up right from the can. Instead, she drained the beans, put them in a casserole dish, added barbecue sauce, mustard, a chopped onion, and brown sugar. Then she placed two strips of bacon across the top in an X and put them in the oven. She baked them until they were dry enough that when…
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I Can Do This
I’m writing this on Fat Tuesday–we’ve been running moving-type errands today, getting ready for the movers to come tomorrow to pick up what Fred, our mover, (he rocks!) calls “the declutter load.” We’ve emptied closets, packed box after box, bin after bin, taken down photographs, and packed away tchotchkes and beloved knickknacks in an attempt to depersonalize our home in preparation for staging it and putting it up for sale. It’s been…freeing in many ways but also bittersweet, and I’ve discovered that there is no way to neutralize this house. It’s been too lived in, too loved in. Our rooms are cozy and warm and inviting, so I’m counting on…
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Getting Older or Better?
Seems like this year, June is going to start out with an emotions overload. Yesterday was sister Kate’s birthday. She’d have been 67 and we lost her way too soon. I was so counting on becoming feisty senior citizens with my sisters, like my Nana and her sister Alice. They were so funny and got on one another’s nerves and loved each other with all their hearts. I thank God I still have PJ to make those kinds of memories with–we’ve promised each other we’ll live to an old age and drive each other crazy. I’m counting on you, PJ! Today is the celebration of life service for my friend…
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Best Friends
Yes, it’s me, looking for peace again . . . You see, my dear Dee died on Monday–quietly and surrounded by her family, she moved on. I don’t deny I’m grateful that she is finally free from the cancer that has racked her body for five long years. I’m happy that she’s finally reunited with the love of her life because she’d been longing for that. I’m glad this horrible siege of illness is over for her sons, who can now remember their Mom as the vital beautiful woman she was, even when cancer stole that from her. Honestly, I’m even a little relieved that my life may return to…
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The Last 4,000 Words
I’m in the home stretch with Saving Sarah, book 4 of the Women of Willow Bay series. I can’t wait to finish it, but there is a little bit of bittersweet involved, too. I’m not positive, but I think this will be the last WOWB book. I have another woman in the village who could have a story, but I’m pretty sure it’s time to close this one out. I have a new book already started and I like the characters and the setting, which is Indiana, not Michigan. Of course, we’re up in northern Indiana near the dunes and Lake Michigan because I can’t imagine a story without a…