The Reindeer Keeper

 IN RECOGNITION of SEPTEMBER BEING NATIONAL SEWING MONTH I have written extensively about my mother’s fabric shop which was attached to our home out in the country where I spent many a school evening ‘designing’ outfits instead of doing homework, especially math. When I was in my preteens my grandmother taught sewing on Saturday mornings during the winter in my mother's shop. That is where I learned about darts and inseams, marking, and pinning patterns and secrets on how to cut patterns out. 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. And when she was not the instructor, she would be in her home, in her sewing room sitting at her little black Singer sewing machine with a tape measure around her neck, pumping the foot pedal and turning out one beautifully sewn item after another. She had the eye for her artform and when you have the eye, creativity is the driving force. My mother also had the eye. She w...

I have a drawer in an old cupboard where I keep phone books. Lots of old phone books. Some people find it funny that I keep them when we now have phones that store people's phone numbers, making them available to us instantly on demand. While on demand saves you time, it also deprives you of a moment of slowing down and searching pages full of names and addresses and those phone numbers.  I've always considered phone books to be mini history books of a certain place and a certain time. They offer glimpses of names of people who may have moved or passed away or once been your neighbor on a street of long ago. They highlight businesses, everything from corner stores you may have frequented on your way home from school to retail stores that might have since been torn down or closed or moved away. They list the banks. The schools. The funeral homes. The industries and lawyers and hospitals and everything else that makes up a community. And we can't forget those Yellow Pages. I ...

Did you ever look at an old photo and wish you could remember the moment? That's how I felt when looking at this photo of  me holding my baby sister. Behind us is our father. We are in the kitchen of our grandparents' farmhouse. To my left, with only a corner showing, is the kitchen table. My grandmother's woodstove was beyond the kitchen table. A built-in cupboard stood in the corner.  The door in the photo led outside to a small, cement stoop and beyond to the root cellar, pump house, barn, grain shed, chicken coop, fields and the creek. I'm guessing we were gathered for a family event. I'm guessing it might have been an Easter Sunday since my sister was born in January. But I'm only guessing. It looks as if there's still snow on the ground. That doesn't matter. It still could have been Easter. Seeing my father wearing a tie isn't surprising to me. He most always wore a tie, even when he went to the post office or grocery store.  My father mo...

I was in Morocco visiting my daughter, an ESL instructor. I'd brought along a children's book I'd written & illustrated plus a little doll for us to use with her students. After visiting the school, we caught the Marrakesh Express in Casablanca-destination Marrakesh! I could hear Crosby, Stills & Nash in every nook of that old train, chugging past shepherds using cell phones while sitting on donkeys.  And while onboard that train, I made a friend. I never did learn her name. She was a beautiful, young girl sitting across from us with her mother and grandmother. While language was a barrier, it didn't matter. We communicated just fine. When the train slowed and it became apparent it was their stop, I reached into my purse, pulled out the doll and gestured to the mom if I could give the doll to her daughter. Her smile said it all. As they disappeared into the crowd I watched as the young girl held the doll up for me to see, waving the little doll in the gent...