Memorial Day, commenced in 1866 as Decoration Day, was at first specifically meant to honor the Confederate dead; when it became a national holiday in 1921, it was renamed to honor the dead in all our wars, another effort to erase differences and commodify mourning.
Twin These Houses — The Blue Box
Both houses, uninhabitable due to size in both cases and dereliction in one, will continue as housing for myths, the myths that always throng around fortunes and obscure most of the facts about the fortune-makers lives.
Moving Around…
I find it easier to take the temperature of the world (or my version of the world) when I’m moving around than when I’m at home, which at this point means moving through the air.
Going Home
How do we teach girls the daring they need to leave home? Perhaps it depends on dismissing some of the sentimental clouds that obscure the reality of home, and remembering that Sting’s north of England was a place of grime and hard work.
But he clearly was born with the need and the drive to get out. Is this something that comes naturally, without encouragement, to boys? What are our girls missing?
Lullaby of Broadway
New York is no longer my city of dreams, and has not been for many years, but it will be fascinating as the plane descends through dense layers of fog to remember that girl who thought that New York, alone, could supply her with the satisfaction of her desires.
Iona and Sallie; Sallie and Munda: Granddaughters and Grandmothers
Yesterday my granddaughter Iona Ellsworth invited me to tea and we chatted for a while with the particular warm intimacy and understanding that seems to exist, often, between grandmothers and their blessed grandchildren—blessed by our love as well as by their many gifts.
The Times They Are a-Changing
Sometimes, not too many times, I find myself complaining that things have stopped moving forward and even begun moving backwards after the heady transformations of customs and attitudes that changed my life in the 1970’s.
Hometown Reading: Carmichael’s Bookstore
I always find that a reading in my hometown is both warmer and more disconcerting than reading in other cities, warmer, because so many old friends and relatives are sitting on the chairs at the back of the bookstore, disconcerting because they are old friends and relatives who do not view me first of all as a writer. Either they know too much about me, or not enough. They have come out of that mixture of kindness and curiosity—what we call support—that leaves me a little breathless, like a hearty slap on the back.
Where is your Cynefin?
On the New Mexico Wildfires Here in the mountains north-east of Santa Fe, the winds are carrying more smoke up from the Wallow Fire, down on the Arizona border; the
High School Reunion
SO HERE WE ARE after all these years—more than fifty—gathered together for the second time since we graduated from the private all-girls school in Louisville, Kentucky—before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Women’s Movement, before Vietnam and all the wars that have followed it.