"Room 373," the hotel clerk said. I sighed with relief. I'd been staying at numerous hotels in the past year and trying to remember room numbers had become a nuisance. But 373 instantly registered as the number of the hymn, Beautiful Savior, in the red Psalter Hymnal of the church of my childhood. The hymn …
Category: friends
Growing Older: Relationships
We've just returned from a trip to MN, followed by a trip "back east" to Michigan and Chicago, to see family that included my first visit back to the cemetery where my sister Esther was buried last April. Bittersweet, for sure. And we saw a lot of friends. Just before those trips, I hosted a …
A little bit of kindness can go a long way…
I’ve had it with mudslinging, most of it untrue, and thought it would stop after the election, but it hasn't, so I want to write about being kind. I got the idea this morning when I was sitting in a coffee shop and overheard a conversation. A gal was interviewing for a job that could …
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Meeting My Same Name New Friend
Imagine checking your emails and seeing one from yourself. A similar thing happened to me in September of 2015; I opened my blog one morning to find a comment written on a post by "Lois Roelofs." Imagine my surprise. How could that be? I had not written myself. I opened up the comment and read: …
The Move (7) — Leaving Five Places
Fifty years ago we moved to the Chicago area, and as I’m contemplating moving again next week, I’m skipping through the five places we’ve lived in my mind. It was a hot sultry summer in 1966 when we took up temporary residence in our Aunt Jennie’s basement bedroom on 57th Court in the western suburb …
Growing Older: Moving to Grandchildren
Yes, you read that right. After eleven years of high-rise living in Chicago’s Loop, my husband and I are moving to a ground-level ranch in Sioux Falls, SD, in an area with lots of grass and evergreens near our little grandchildren. We’ve just told our family and friends. Responses have at first been shock, then …
Greening of Chicago River – 2016
From the Chicago Tribune today: "The annual dyeing of the Chicago River for St. Patrick's Day is a family reunion for the Butler and Rowan clans, the two families responsible for the tradition of turning the murky water into a bright 'Ghostbusters' Slimer green for more than 50 years." The tradition started in 1962 and …
An Arizona Winter Get-a-way
Even though our Chicago winter has been mild, I love to go somewhere guaranteed to be warm. After taking an eleven-day Palm Desert vacation with a sister, my husband and I spent six grand days in AZ. We stayed with friends from my husband's high school days, met several folks from his MN hometown, lunched …
Celebrating Forty Years of Friendship
Proverbs 18:26 Friends come and friends go, but a true friend sticks by you like family. Readers of Caring Lessons know I was desperate to find a friend when I was in my early thirties, someone like me, a nurse and mom who wanted to go back to school. That friend turned out to be …
Caring Lessons / WOW Blog Tour – Stop #10 / Hot Fudge Friends
Today, I'm all about being an older woman who wears purple, albeit with no red hat on my head, and who is thankful for my long-term friendship with Marianna, a person with whom I've walked many miles of fun and silliness and tanked in hard-to-fathom-at-the-time sorrows. So for today's Caring Lessons blog tour, when I …
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Write Along with Me 