WHO RODE WITH YOU, PAUL REVERE? by Yvonne Saxon

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-five,

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.”  -from “Paul Revere’s Ride” 

 

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-1860

THE 1950S KITCHEN: MODERN CONVENIENCE MEETS DOMESTIC IDEAL by Ellen Butler

Ariadne Winter is far too busy clawing her way up the journalism ladder to fuss over perfect meringues. Ambitious, driven, and unapologetically career-minded, she has little patience for the domestic ideals so carefully prescribed for women of the 1950s. Fortunately, she isn’t married—yet. In her world, middle-class wives are expected to surrender their professions for aprons and routines, trading ambition for spotless kitchens and well-fed husbands. Should Ariadne ever yield to the life her mother envisions, she might at least find some consolation in the gleaming promise of modern appliances—those marvels of convenience designed to make domesticity seem less like confinement and more like progress.

BIBLIOTHERAPY AND LOSS by Jeff Tanner, Guest Blogger

[I had another blog post ready to go, but recent events have pushed that aside.]

When I was young, I was the kid who checked out a stack of books from the library as big as I could carry. I read everything – from Encyclopedia Brown to classics like Twain and Dickens, then Agatha Christie to That Was Then, This is Now, Watership Down, and short stories like “Success” and “The Lottery.” I learned so much from books.

But not everything.