by Merna Zimmerman I was a very dissatisfied teen ager when I became a senior in High School. I had always been a well behaved daughter, but I had begun to notice that compared to many of my school mates, I had almost no freedoms. Some of them had jobs and even their own car. […]
A Life of Grace and Focus – Great Aunt Carrie
by Arlene Valentine They were a powerful triad in my life……my grandmother Sarah and her two sisters, Rita and Carrie. As the oldest child in a very poor farm family in a hill town on the shore of the Adriatic Sea in Italy, by the time she was eight years old Carrie was in charge […]
Mrs. Snellback
by Irene McHugh Time traveling to 1982: I entered Mrs. Snellback’s 6th grade reading and writing classroom at Lincoln Elementary School in Wyckoff, NJ. An imposing figure who took her teaching seriously, she clearly put up with no sass. For anyone who smarted off to her or another student, she assigned the dreaded 500 word […]
The Rooster in My Kitchen
by Mithra Ballesteros In a small corner of my kitchen hangs this framed needlepoint rooster, one of my most beloved possessions. My Persian grandmother stitched it when she was a young girl living in Hamadan, Iran, probably sometime in the 1920s. Her name was Zarrin and she was very talented with a needle. After her […]