Tag Archives: Community

I remember May Basket Day on the first of May when I was a small child. My mother would help me make cone-shaped paper baskets, then we’d pick Lilly of the Valley and violets from the abundant supply in our yard and fill the little paper holders with fragrant blooms. ...

My great-grandmother was beautiful. Her given name was Margaret Mary, but she was known as  “Pretty Marie” from the time she was a girl. Her curly hair was raven-colored, piled high on her head, her eyes large and deep brown in color. She had very defined lips, curved in a ...

In the television drama The Waltons, grandparents Zeb and Esther lived with their son, daughter-in-law, and seven grandchildren as the family struggled in the grips of the Great Depression.  The family had little in the way of worldly goods, but they had a bond of love and support for one ...

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” Charles Dickens Charles Dickens was born into an impoverished English family in 1812. One of eight children in the Dickens Family, his father was a naval clerk who fancied becoming a rich man. It was a dream ...

Midwestern newspapers described the summer of 1873 as a season when “tropical weariness drooped over all.”  Heaviness hung like the sweat dripping   from trousers, woolen skirts, and long-sleeved shirts, as people performed their daily tasks. That stifling heat would be blamed for everything under the blazing sun— rampant spread of ...