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Guilt Vase; Uncovering Secrets in the Laundry Closet
Sometime in the late 1980s, my mother-in-law, Margaret, had asked me to come clean out her laundry closet. It seemed like an innocent mission: organize the chaos, recover anything useful, and toss the rest. Silly thinking on my part! This was a weird cubby hole built into the top of the basement stairs. It was…
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Choosing Peace Over Politics One Pillow at a Time
It was a well-known and often joked-about fact that my father-in-law, Eddie, was a Democrat through and through, just as his father, a first-generation Irish immigrant, had been. And my mother-in-law, Margaret, was an old-school Republican. Her father was a Republican, and if his father had been a United States citizen, I suspect he would…
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When the Sky Held Its Breath: Uncle Ernie
Great Uncle Ernie stared down at the photos I had given him. With a dreamy look in his rummy eyes, he said, “I remember that day.” Escaping the farm In November 1934, Uncle Ernie was starting his second decade in the Marine Corps. He enlisted in the army in 1924 at the age of 21.…