family

Off to Seattle for the weekend to see my beloved stepmother Susan and hear my friend Jim Fergus read from his terrific new book, The Wild Girl : The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 I am thoroughly looking forward to a few days in a real city — I havent’ been to Seattle since...
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This morning my friend Nina called and asked, with that sort of tense tone in her voice, what I was doing. Why? I said. Do you need a rescue? Turns out, she was in the car with the twins, who had a pediatrician’s appointment, and her husband (who is writing for TV trying to...
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My grandmother is ninety four today. Ninety four! She’s still got all her faculties, although she’s got a glass eye, and an artificial hip. She started a lending library in her little farm town in Illiniois at ninety because she’d “retired” and she needed a project. So she got a lot of people to...
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Ah, The Kentucky Derby. When we were little kids, our parents belonged to a not-terribly-fancy Hunt Club in northern Illinois. Admitting that I come from people who foxhunted is, in the circles in which I travel as an adult, sort of like saying we wore hoop skirts or held slaves. Stange, exotic and totally...
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Granny Got A Brand-new Hip My 93-year-old grandmother had her hip replaced on Monday because she wants to ride again. It’s been three years since she could sit a horse, and since riding is her greatest joy, she willingly went in and let them, well, cut her leg off and put it back on...
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Everybody Likes Cake, Part 2 Yesterday I moved a dumptruck load of compost into my new raised beds. I do not recommend moving a dumptruck load of compost by oneself, especially if one is, as I am, a small-ish woman who is no longer the strong thing she was in her twenties. It was...
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Roast Chicken to Cure the Blues My darling brother has a new girlfriend, and of course, when you are no longer young, new relationships tend to come with some baggage. The Nice Girlfriend had a tough day yesterday, her baggage was all noisy with her about the fact that she’s moving on in life,...
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Living Small in Eastern Europe My father, Jim Freeman, has lived in the Czech Republic since 1992 or so, and although for a number of years we didn’t really hear from him much, over the last couple of years he and I have developed a nice email relationship. Dad sent his last weekend, and...
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Marion Cunningham, one of my food heros, has a great piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of family cooking and mealtime. I don’t get it. My family life as a kid was pretty chaotic, but my mother always cooked, and taught both my brother and I to cook along with her....
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