She Told Me My Work Belonged in a Barn Not Her Boutique So I Let the Whole County Decide
The first time Odette Marchetti made me feel small, she did it with a smile and a pair of reading glasses she did not need. I was sixty-one years old […]
The Brides Mother Crossed My Name Off the List and My Grandson Sat Me at the Head Table Anyway
For forty-one years I cut hair in the front room of my house on Sorrel Street, in a town in central Nebraska so small the welcome sign and the goodbye […]
My Grandkids Built Me a Dating Profile as a Joke and the First Woman Who Wrote Back Was the Neighbor I Had Dodged for Ten Years
I am seventy-one years old, and until this past spring I believed I had reached the age where nothing new could happen to me. I want to tell you how […]
They Called Me Just The Waitress Until The Day I Bought The Man Trying To Bulldoze Us
The first time Sutton Vance walked into the Bluestem, he wiped the seat of the corner booth with a paper napkin before he sat down. I watched him do it. […]
I Was The Daughter My Mother Never Chose Until I Opened The Hope Chest She Left Only To Me
For fifty-one years I believed I was the daughter my mother tolerated and my sister was the daughter she loved. I was so certain of it that I built my […]
He Called Me Just A Waitress So I Spent Nine Years Quietly Buying The Diner He Owned
The first thing the new owner said to me, after he had owned the place for exactly four days, was that I should smile more. He said it the way […]
They Said I Could Never Run It So I Bought It Myself And Spent One Season Proving Otherwise
The morning Thaddeus Orsini told me a woman had no business running a row-crop operation, I was standing in his machine shed with manure on my boots and forty dollars […]
I Was Eleven the First Time I Drove That Tractor and Forty Years Later My Stepmother Told the Whole County I Never Set Foot on Our Farm
The morning Lorna stood up in the basement of Zion Lutheran and told two hundred of our neighbors that my brother and I had never worked a single day on […]
They Voted to Take My Farm Until a Clerk Read One Forgotten Line
The first time I understood they meant to take it, I was standing in my own kitchen with a coffee cup going cold in my hand, watching a man named […]
My Brother Forged Our Dead Fathers Name to Steal the Store Until the Whole Town Walked In
For forty-one years my father stood behind the long oak counter at the front of Aldous Hardware, and in all that time I never once saw him let a man […]