Columns

I hummed along to Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls” and set the dining room table for Thanksgiving Day dinner guests: our daughter Ruth, and Mel’s younger brother Miles and his wife Mary from Whitefish Lake. Miller’s sliding trombone provoked memories of 18960 Joann...

The early 1950s saw major changes in the health care industry. Advancements in medicines, treatments, and surgical techniques radically changed the designs of hospitals. The rise of labor unions resulted in more people having health insurance, which changed how...

Pardon me, dear Reader, for this hurried letter. You see, my beloved Uncle Tab, the baby of Floyd and Ollie McCoy’s children, passed away last Friday at age eighty-nine. His funeral is in two days in Lexington, Kentucky. My four sisters and I now have one older...

Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in a series about Dr. Dorothy Leith and her home and office at 240 Main Street in Imlay City. Her patients, now grown up and retired, can recall bits and oddities of their trips to the Dr. Leith’s office at 240 Main St....

When Mel and I visited Angie and El in Saline last March, they removed their robot vacuum from the coat closet for a demo. “A Christmas gift from the grandkids,” Angie said. Although impressed with the cute and mute machine, I was inclined to use what we have. Our...

Have you ever been bone-tired? Growing up, nearly everyone had a garden, even if just a small one and most people used a rototiller to break up the ground in the spring. I’d never pondered what someone did before the invention of rototillers or when one was broken...

When we moved our family from Detroit’s streetlights to a country road in February 1989, we learned the phrase, “We’ll keep a light on for you.” Under a new moon, we couldn’t find our way to our neighbor’s house on the corner without their lights to guide us. Beyond...

In the summer of 1833, John and Jean Hunter Hopkin and their three children, along with William and Margaret Gray Robertson and their two children, traveled directly from Scotland to the Scotch Settlement area in southeastern Almont Township. They were the first Scots...

Today I lunched on asparagus soup as October shed her wet and windblown clothes. Another season concludes, the divide wider between my childhood and present day. A challenge for a writer devoted to memoir, to sustain authenticity of times, places, things, and people....

This is the first in a multi-part series about Dr. Dorothy Leith and her home and office at 240 Main Street in Imlay City. Last month I wrote about a special house in Imlay as it is defined in the Webster dictionary: “a building for human habitation, especially one...