NOTES FOR EFFICIENT LIVING   1. Rise early. Rise a half hour earlier than your normal waking time. 0.1 If you have not already done so, go to bed early the night before. This will ensure you can rise early. 1.1. Having risen early, use this extra morning time efficiently. 1.1.1 As soon as your morning ablutions are over, before you have done anything...

Kindergarten was for the most part a pleasant time, though my most vivid memory of that year is of a sour disappointment. We were required to demonstrate competence in tying our shoes, with a promised reward of a large gold star on our report card. I begged my mother to instruct me in the art of shoe-tying. Not understanding the high stakes, she did...

Not ladies who lunch, but the lunch ladies, are today's topic. Do you walk to school or carry your lunch? In grade school, sometimes I did both. We lived down the street from the elementary school. Bus rides didn't happen for me until sixth grade, though there were plenty of kids who did ride the bus up into Bobtown for grade school. (And I do mean...

The three wise aunts: next door, Aunt Nellie, across the street Aunt Mary, and catty-corner across the street was Aunt Stella. These were in fact my great-aunts. Mary was sister to my mother's mother, Nellie sister to mom's father, and Stella was married to a brother of mom's father. Mom, bereft of her mother, relied heavily on these women in the early...

This was originally a Storify, tweeted out in 2013 shortly after my mother passed away.  I've rescued it to here because, as Christina Pikas reminds us, Storify is going away this spring.  Sometimes I feel I understood little and lived as an overgrown adolescent most of my life. Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I began to attend more closely to my mother's...

Sisters and cousins - I was surrounded by, embedded in a web of these, growing up. I grew up with two sisters, one a year-and-a-half younger, one four years older. Down the street from us lived our second cousins, also a family of three girls and three boys, the girls approximately the same ages as we were. My sisters and I were all in the marching...