…Not exactly a wilderness but a great expanse of desert, south of Santa Fe, that goes on for miles and miles to the sprawling town of Alamogordo.
The Secret Bunker
A big resort in the mountains of West Virginia, called The Greenbrier, figured often in my great-grandmother Sallie’s tales of her girlhood in Richmond.
Astride: Women, Girls, Horses—and Wolves
Wilderness can be healing. So, too, can the company of horses… they give a woman perched bareback sustenance, reassurance, even love.
The Manless World: Show Jumping
Somewhere along the way, women took over this sport, although there are still men at the highest levels.
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.
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.
Digging Up The Bones – The Blue Box
As I prepare for publication next month, I face the daunting task of listing all the material I’ve used in The Blue Box, many letters, speeches, bills of sale, wills and genealogies that were stored in the blue box itself.
Naming Names — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
I realized today…that I never heard anyone in my family or outside of it mention my material grandmother, Sallie Montague Lefroy. This seems particularly strange since it seems I was named for her—seems because no one ever mentioned that either, but since we are both called Sallie Montague, it seems likely that I was named for her—and I am the only one of five siblings given a name from my mother’s family rather than my father’s.