In Like a Lion…?

By Kathi Macias

March is one of those in-between months that make planning anything nearly impossible. It doesn’t matter where you live—those hearty folks in Alaska or Minnesota, or the wimps (like me!) in Hawaii and Southern California—anything scheduled ahead of time had best be held indoors.

Read more

Indians, Bears, and Strange Noises—Oh My!

By Jodi Whisenhunt

My family lived in the country when I was a child, on a remote mountain in West Virginia. I don’t know the acreage—didn’t occur to me to care as a little girl—but it was forested enough for my brother to terrify me with tales of ferocious bears and rogue Indians. Yes, Indians. In the 1970s.
Read more

Recline in Peace

By Emily Chase

Crack!

My husband plunks down on our recliner and breaks the mechanism.  The chair now has a severe cant to one side.  After years of warning our children not to abuse the chair, my husband has broken it himself.

“Don’t worry, Gene,” I assure him.  “The chair came with a lifetime warranty.”

Read more

Keep on Pluckin’

I have been molting all winter.

For months now, people have been treating me like a Perdue chicken by plucking feathers off of me wherever I go.  It’s the fault of my leaky down-filled coat.  I don my down in mid-September, and remove it in early June.  This winter, though, the down is trying to make an early escape.

Read more

A Love Worth Celebrating

By Kathi Macias

February is quite a month, isn’t it? Shorter than the other eleven, it honors everything from past Presidents to groundhogs. But by far the most celebrated holiday of the month is found smack-dab in the middle of it: Valentine’s Day.

Personally, I’ve never been too enamored of the chubby little baby with the bow and arrow who flies around trying to zing people into falling in love, but the sentiment is nice. To be honest, though, the actual holiday doesn’t appear to be based on such light-hearted frivolities as exchanging chocolates and cards and jewelry. The most commonly accepted start to the holiday came—at least so far as legend tells it—by way of a beheading. It seems a Roman priest performed weddings against the Emperor’s orders and paid the ultimate price. So how did we get from someone getting his head lopped off to lace and candy and sentimental poems?
Read more

Next Page »