Senior Women Web

Joan L. Cannon writes: Several hundred pounds of bookshelves that were to be left behind for Habitat, and one for a friend, arrived here where I have no place to put them. Such treasures as all my baking pans, including the ones that fit my toaster oven, are somewhere between here and North Carolina. How could they have lost the smallish box with my (expensive) no-line bifocals I use to watch TV? Ditto the basket of un-ironed tablecloths I left to await pressing after they got here.   more »

My husband and I had already yanked inside-out all the pockets of his clothing. Had already peered under the bed, under the nightstand, under the couch cushions, under the couch. When all of these turned up empty, a dark thought entered my head: Tommy must have left them in the front door and some miscreant absconded with them.  It was like an episode of CSI when the team prepares to search a dumpster for some vital clue. more »

Adventurous avant-garde picture books from Bolshevik Russia; a Civil War-era patriotic reader published for children of the Confederate States; a Noah Webster speller aimed at teaching a uniquely American English to the schoolchildren of the newly formed US; the manuscript of James Stephens’s Irish Fairy Tales to help preserve Irish tradition in a time of English rule; Japanese comic books meant to teach children English during the post-war Allied Occupation; a fascinating recent picture book from post-colonial Francophone Africa. more »

Margaret Cullison writes: Flush from the post-war economic boom, Dad bought his first airplane, a 1946 cream and red Taylorcraft BC-12D. I recall the anticipation stirring in the pit of my stomach as we waited for someone to prime the propeller and yell out above the noise of the wind and the engine, "all clear", as he waved us out onto the runway. I recall the instant the wheels left the ground, that first gentle lift into the air, and a magic I didn't understand moved us skyward. more »