With Sticks and Stones
TWO DAYS BEFORE SEPT. 11, I visited one of my favorite Minnesota small towns and annual festivals. I went to Northfield for the Defeat of Jesse James Days.
This year was the 125th anniversary of the fateful day when members of the James-Younger gang rode across the bridge into town. The people of Northfield take...
The Ties That Bind
HOMEMADE PASTE. The taste in my mouth on Valentine’s Day is not Godiva chocolate, but the humble flour-and-water adhesive my mother concocted in the kitchen each February.
My sisters and I would gather around the kitchen table with pink and red construction paper, white paper doilies, and boxes of those hard-as-cement conversation heart candies. Then...
Luck of the Draw
NO SOONER has the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie been served than we begin the exalted family ritual: the drawing of the names. There’s a certain historic economic sense to this in a family of six siblings. When we were all little girls, it was hard to make that $1.25 allowance stretch five ways, so we...
Burst Bubbles
SITTING IN THE ORPHEUM watching Riverdance, the shuffle-shuffle-ball-change suddenly came back to me.
A 30-year-old seed of regret, along with a couple of tricky tap combinations, bubbled to the surface of my consciousness. It could have been me up on that stage. I, too, could have tapped my way across the country with handsome Irishmen....
Asking God to Sign In
AS SECOND GRADERS at St. Raphael’s Elementary School, we had to leave room on our chairs for guardian angels.
Sister Emerita patrolled the aisles, prodding our 8-year-old bottoms with her yardstick, scootching us over another half inch. Apparently guardian angels had big tushes. While Sister paced the rows of desks, I peered into the air...