By the time we got married, I was 29 years old and I had established my name through news reporting. I wasn’t a celebrity by any stretch of the imagination. But people did associate Gretchen Lord with news writing. It was still early in the years that led up to a complete acceptance of women…
A dear friend of mine took a fall over the weekend. Because her short-term memory is increasingly absent, she has no memory of the fall or how long she lay on the floor before her sister who just happened to be in town for the weekend stopped in to see her. Turns out that no…
I happened to look out the front windows earlier this week at just the right time and into Terry’s rose garden. There is plenty to see out there with the flowing bird bath and flowers and the nearby flowering crab tree. But what caught my eye was a cobweb. The morning light was just right…
Maybe it’s been too much “Big Bang Theory” for me, but I got interested enough in the International Space Station to do a little research about it. In so doing, I found that I could sign up for email notices whenever the ISS would be visible from our home in south central Wisconsin. For about…
It was just over two years ago. We had secured four very nice seats in Miller Park for a Brewers game (I can’t even remember who they were playing) and had headed over with two friends. Now, I enjoy a good baseball game. But sometimes, even the most ardent fans have to admit, beauty is…
Some of my readers may be familiar with my husband’s pick-up truck. It’s a 1995 Dodge Dakota. It wasn’t new when he got it. It was what’s called a “program vehicle.” That means it was perhaps part of a fleet of vehicles leased by a car rental agency like Hertz or Avis. We know that…
Having found myself once again in several surgery waiting rooms and in different hospitals over the last week, I can’t help but look back on the numbers of hours over my life that I have been in that situation. I have been in hospital waiting rooms as a friend, a pastor, and a family member.…
There were a number of years when we would gather with two or three other families and head to the Black Hills of South Dakota for a weekend. We stayed in a lodge with a huge rock fireplace in the living room. With walls of log in the midst of the forest, the only thing…
Whether the issue is political or local gossip, there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to commentary taken out of context. I know I was the object of a lot of community gossip when I served a church and a rumor got around town that I had refused a gun salute at a military funeral.…
Imagine my surprise when I got into college and adulthood and discovered that many of my girlfriends had already planned out much of their weddings even though they hadn’t met the man they were going to marry. Some of them had gotten the process underway and, encouraged by their mothers, had been putting away in…