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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