Was It Long Ago?

It was a different time. My teenage years were almost unbelievably different when compared to the lives of today’s teens. Were those days better? Do I see them through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia? Those days, so long ago, were far from perfect; however, there was an innocence and a wide-eyed wonder. We wore bobby […]

Times Like These

In uncertain times, we need an anchor, something unchangeable that we can cling to. It helps to have reminders that people have gone through hard times before now, and survived. My granddaughter and I are interested in genealogy. She has traced one line of our ancestry back to the 1400s. Now, that’s a long time […]

Remembering Summer

Those summer memories of childhood! I remember running barefoot through tickly grass, walking through dusty places and feeling warm dust puff up between my toes, dancing quickly over rocks that were too hot for lingering.  Summer was hot, but I didn’t mind. It was the way summer was supposed to be. Of course, if we had […]

Mother’s Day

On Mother’s Day, Mom always wore a corsage of white roses to church. Used to be that was the custom–if your mother was no longer with you, you wore white flowers; if she was still here, you wore red flowers. That tradition has probably flown, like so many. I was singularly blessed to have Susie […]

Looking Back

This is the second and final installment of my May 5, 1985 Daily Press article about the tornado which destroyed Peggs, Oklahoma on May 2, 1920. In 1920, Walter Neel lived with his parents, brothers and sisters on the Gid Morgan farm, two and a fourth miles southeast of Peggs. The storm went a mile […]

A Look Back

Each year I re-print the story of the Peggs tornado that I wrote for The Tahlequah Daily Press in 1985. This story is important because it is a part of our history. It is a sad story, but it is also full of human compassion and courage. We should not forget the many whose lives […]