The ritual that returns to me most vividly this December is one I call Acting Christmas
What Happened to Austin Brown?
Why is it interesting or worthwhile to continue to wonder about the fate of my first cousin?
Christmas Eve: My Mother’s 111th Birthday
I understand her decision although it causes me a spasm of regret, as all the dreams abandoned by women do: the great heap of the unrealistic and the unrealizable that lies alongside nearly every woman’s life.
Kicking Against The Pricks
My mother wisely warned me many times against “kicking against the pricks,” by which she meant the inevitable barriers we face in life, not the male appendage. She would have been horrified by that association.
Digging Up The Bones 2 — The Blue Box
This morning I found a faded copy of a newspaper photo, certainly from the old Society Page of a Richmond Virginia daily, showing a group of three young people, two men and a woman, marching down Monument Avenue in that city, the broad magisterial artery where the greats of the Confederacy are memorialized in huge marble statues.
On The Blue Box
The Blue Box does not share the soft glow that softens the details of so many family histories; its light approaches a glare.
Mother Mary — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
Having drawn all she could from that source, desperate to go to college, for which she would have to have a scholarship (none of the women in her family had ever dreamed of college), she “dropped out” in the most literal sense, leaving not only school but her mother’s crowded household to go as a sort of nonpaying border to an exceptionally gifted playwright and producer from New York, whose influence would be supreme.
My Mother’s Eyes
When I became aware of her as my mother (I was her third child), she was a tiny blond woman, almost doll-like, formed by the conventions of upper class marriage. I almost never saw her without make-up, her hair set in careful blond curls, wearing a powerful girdle, a suit and carrying a purse; she seemed always to be armed for a distant battle.