The Reindeer Keeper

I had a cousin when growing up in the country who was (and still is) a talented pianist. I used to love sitting on the piano stool with her in the front parlor of the farmhouse near the stairs while she played. I was amazed how she knew how to hit the right keys-creating something marvelous that drifted through every room-upstairs and down. Her fingers were long and slender. They could stretch across those keys as gracefully as a ballerina warming up before performing. Sometimes she asked me to turn sheets of music for her while she played. They were full of strange little notes and bars that made no sense to me. She'd nod when it was time. On occasion I was one of her students. Chopsticks was as far as I got. I preferred asking her to play Rhapsody in Blue. Music was a part of our playing and pretending back then in our chicken coop clubhouse. Sticks were slammed together; brooms strung like guitars and pretend horns blasted over the fields. And when we went to school, music a...

I've written before about how much fun my cousins and I would have playing down at the creek that flowed behind our houses out in the country. It didn't matter the time of year. We were always down there. I've written about the rafts our uncle made us out of telephone poles and how we'd go all over that creek pretending this or that. It was called Sucker Creek for a reason-there were blood suckers in it but it never kept us away. We just never swam in the murky water. In the winter we'd skate for hours-even at night under the moonlight. But it was one Saturday morning, as the hint of spring was in the air while snow was still covering the ground and the ice was still intact, that will forever remain my most poignant memory of those days down at the creek. My mother asked me to watch my sister-who is seven years younger than me-as out the front door we went to play. I must have been around eleven years old at the time. Her last instructions were firm, "Don...

Celebrate! This is the day of hearts and chocolates and little messages of caring and expressions of Love! Happy Valentine's Day!

When I was in my preteens my grandmother taught sewing on Saturday mornings during the winter in my mother's fabric shop which was attached to our home. That's where I learned about darts and inseams; marking and pinning patterns and secrets of how to cut the patterns out. I discovered how some materials such as silks and velvets are harder to sew than others like cottons and rayon. While it took me forever to trim a pattern, pin it to the fabric, and cut it out, my grandmother did it in lightning speed. On went the pins and soon, off they came. That's the manner in which she sewed, too. And when she wasn't the instructor, she'd be at her little black Singer sewing machine pumping the foot pedal and turning out one item after another. This instructor never needed a pattern back home in her sewing room. She had the eye for her artform and those of us lucky enough to be in her family, benefited. When you have the eye-the imagination, the creativity is the driving for...