Janet's Blog

It must be hereditary--that compulsion to grow tangled tomatoes.  When we lived on the farm, Mom and Dad grew a regular garden on the north side of the big red barn, with radishes, peas, beans, potatoes, lettuce, and tomatoes, all in nice, neat rows.(Even at the age of three, I was able to push each shriveled pea seed into the moist, brown dirt.) The sweet corn, with extra to sell, was planted on the edge of the adjacent corn field. When we moved to Norfolk, we didn't have any garden at all, and when we moved to Fairbury shortly after my ninth birthday, there was no place for a garden--until Dad bought an old house a block away from the Hotel Mary-Etta, where we lived, and where Mom and Dad both worked. Dad bought that dilapidated house to use for storage, but he was most interested in the sizeable back yard. The first spring he owned the property, he tilled up half of the backyard and planted several rows of sweet corn, and at least a dozen tomato plants. He probably planted a sho...

Naming a child can be a daunting task for parents. The name has to sound right, and it has to fit the child. Some new parents choose traditional or old-fashioned names, or even Biblical names, for their children, while others are determined to pick suitable names from the current year’s top 100 names lists. Still others use names that honor family members, or even a popular TV character. Some parents want unique names for their children, so they make up names or come up with one-of-a-kind spellings, not thinking much about the bullying their children may face, or how often they will need to spell their names for other people or offer some explanation for a name that is so overly-unique that others may think it is downright weird. These days, parents can find out anything they want to know about any list or any particular name by googling it, but when Bill and I named our biological daughters, we checked out name books from the library, and pored over list after list in hopes of findi...

You've probably heard the story of The Princess and the Pea , written in 1835 by Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen, about a prince whose royal parents wanted him to marry a real princess. Apparently, in Fairy Tale Land, the only way to tell if a girl is really a princess is to stack up a whole pile of mattresses on top of a single pea and, if the girl feels the pea through all of those mattresses, she is the genuine, real deal. I'm no princess, but lately, I'm beginning to understand what that miserable night must have been like for the girl in the story. My misery is usually only momentary, while I grab the offending object from the top of my solitary mattress, where it has deposited itself under my sleeping body. Sometimes, I'm careful to not wake Bill, but other times, let's just say my single-mindedness may cause us both some distress. I'm not in the habit of sleeping with peas. Instead, I wear four finger splints each night, in hopes of keeping my arth...