Of all of our friends, my husband and I were most looking forward to the empty nest. We were going to be great at it! We’d travel. We’d go to the symphony. We’d eat out every night. We’d take romantic long weekends at least once a month. We were planning a wonderful post-kid life. My…
A simple cheddar cheese sandwich on white bread, purchased from a cart on the street near our hotel — this was my first meal in England circa 1984. Simple, yet wholesome, and perfect for a hungry college student just off her first international flight. There was something so familiar about that sandwich—just cheese and bread….
The first time I traveled internationally—I mean, really traveled, not just stuck my toe over our northern or southern border—was in 1984. I went to Oxford, England, to study for the summer and came back changed. My world had opened up, and I saw everything through a new lens. Travel became an important passion for…
I fell in love with Charleston the first time I set foot there, probably because it was so different from where I grew up and now live, the flat plains of the Midwest. I had never been to a place with such character, beauty, and history all wrapped into one quaint package, complete with horse-drawn…
Yesterday I got a knock on my office door. A young man from one of my classes stopped by for some help with a paper, so, as is my personality, I tried to break the ice by asking about his weekend. “Oh, it was O.K.,” he said with a slight grin. “One part was a…
R.C. Sproul recently said that he regretted that he didn’t hold his wife’s hand more often when she was alive, and that admission is what prompted this post. ***** I don’t know how or when it started, but I would guess that it was after a fight. You know how some Sunday mornings go: a…
Dear Daughters, From the day each of you was born, I felt a deep responsibility to prepare you for the world in which you will live. I’ve tried to model for you what I believed to be best for your life, but, on occasion (OK, many occasions), I have failed. Oh boy, have I failed….
I don’t write much about my classes or about being a professor or about my life at an academic institution. Some of that is because I’ve never been comfortable being called “Professor”-anything and some of that is because the stories from my classroom are just that—from my classroom and not from my “real” life. Or…