Again my Mother comes to me in a dream: My hair is long, down to my waist long. I wake up and my hair is long, but not down to my waist, which it has never been, which is silly. Hers as a young girl was. When I was a little girl, mine was thin and my older sister’s hair …
I arrived early to my 50th high school class reunion after hitting a bucket of golf balls with Dad’s clubs, the same clubs we used when I last hit a bucket of balls in 1989. It seems that range balls are no longer purchased after a stroll to the pro shop. A machine near the tees plops them into your …
Nick Hennen looks back to a May, 2, 2015, conversation he had with his Mom shortly before she died. It was a little tough to understand her tonight. I decided to partially transcribe the less coherent parts as well to give me a better window into the slipping in and out of what I suppose we’d all agree is real. …
My friend, Nancy Palmer O’Malley, has written a lovely and quietly provocative book, which she intends as a gift to relatives and a small number of friends. But when she shared it with me a few weeks ago, I sense immediately that her wisdom and yearning would resonate with a much larger audience. “My family never wanted to discuss delicate …
About a half dozen years after World War II, Uncle Joe rattled through some woods around Minnesota’s west-central lake country and started to frame a cabin. It was to be about 600 square feet in a clearing with a southern exposure. In winter, the struggling sun would bathe the windows facing the lake, making even a February day a little …
We had the most delightful guests this week for supper. My mother, Marian Crook, and her sister, my godmother, Junette Henke, came for the afternoon. Fresh walleye was on the menu. While Jim pounded away on his keyboard in his office, we three women sat at my dining room table with stacks of papers and maps and books and went …
As the holidays and new year approach, I start thinking about how things have changed since my youth and some of the fun things that have occurred between now and then. My youth was spent in Grand Forks until Dad was appointed to the federal bench at the end of my sophomore year at St. James Academy. My earliest unusual …