Courage and Beauty

Kathleen Marie Wills Verrill: A Tribute Kathie, as she preferred to be called, joined our family when I was still in college. She had met and married my brother a few months before my brother introduced her to us. Born with cerebral palsy, she spent most of her childhood in the shadows. The youngest of […]

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Standing Up to the Meanies

I started school a year later than my first grade classmates because my family had moved from Maine, where children don’t go to kindergarten. I had also come from a rural village where our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down the road. Adjusting to city life was made a little easier by the nearby […]

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Our Words, Our Thoughts, Our Stories

A few months ago, I mentioned to a fellow member of a writers’ group that I was working on a post-Civil War manuscript. Her immediate comment was “You’d better be on the right side of that conflict.” My immediate reaction was a silent grimace, and a sense of foreboding. As an amateur historian with a bias […]

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Never Put in Writing – Repost

Every year that goes by since I first wrote this, I am more certain that the quotation that opens this post is increasingly important to remember. August 23, 2012 “Never put in writing anything you don’t want people to read.”  V.V.Verrill (1913-2005) That is not the only quotation from my mother indelibly enscribed onto my […]

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