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In honor of Mother’s Day, we are running these two updated blogs again. Just Five Questions I Wish I Could Ask My Mom This Mother’s Day by Margaret Crane I thought I knew her well. Yet, now that my mother is gone (she passed away 1 ½ years ago), I am surprised to discover how much I really never knew about her. I guess I took her for granted. It’s a bit like the 100-year-old house we lived in when I was a teenager. The sounds and substance became familiar...the squeak of the stairs, the clinking of the radiators turning...

It sounds glamorous to do a book tour. Fly in and out of cities, take trains, or drive, or have a driver chauffeur you around, and be put up at five-star hotels and wined and dined at only the best Yelp-reviewed restaurants. Then, you get to rhapsodize about your book, sign your name on the title page and add some witty greeting to each reader. When done, you head on to the next destination. Famous YOU! Famous ME or lucky US!  It can be all this when you're a celeb and best-selling author. And then there are authors like ourselves...

It’s rare for us to say “no.” Both of us were brought up in households where we were taught to please. Don’t make waves. Girls are conciliators. Girls are collaborators. (However, we never had a problem saying “no” to smoking or drugs, thank you very much Nancy Reagan.)     Being good girls became ingrained into our psyches. Even after we married and had kids, we almost always said “yes” when asked to do something. As energetic, helpful people, our tendency was to respond to any request by saying, “Sure I can do that.” And if we gave a rare “no,”...

We live with the underlying threat of personal and global tragedy, the shock waves caused by the election, terrorism, poverty, unemployment, superbugs that don’t react to current antibiotics, global warming, and the high cost of everything. Even the simplest acts in life are now potentially dangerous--drinking tap water, eating fresh greens, going on an airplane, riding a train, opening the mail, heading to work, or our kids and grandkids going off to school.  And personally, we worry about everything, from the children to aging parents, personal finance, health, and more With all these concerns filling the daily fabric of our...

I have come home again, moving back to the community where I grew up.  In the early 1950s, our family moved to Clayton, MO, then the sleepy seat of St. Louis County government with a small-town feel. It was the idyllic family community. There was the postcard loveliness of Old Town with its charming frame homes near the downtown. Clayton streets were lined with grand turn-of-the-century homes and mansions, small mid-century homes and apartment buildings, retail stores, and a few low-rise office buildings. There were a few middle-class neighborhoods such as ours of one-story brick ranch houses with big picture...