See what happened to my windshield last week? Why is it that for my first forty years of driving I had no broken windshields, and in the last five years I’ve had three? And all of them on Kansas or Missouri freeways.

Four years ago this month, my husband and I took his mother to Southern California. She had just turned ninety, and she wanted to see the places where she had grown up. In addition to seeing her old homes and schools in the Los Angeles area, we also toured the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. I thought the museum did a good job of presenting the complexities of Nixon the man and the President. The exhibits portrayed Nixon from poor Quaker boy to rising political star to his Checkers speech to his comeback and winning the Presidency to disgrace after Watergate

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Will your family be decorating graves this Memorial Day weekend? It was never a late-May activity in my family when I was growing up, but that’s because we lived in a town where we had no roots. My husband’s family has lived in the same county for five generations. They have many graves to decorate.

I knew there was a super flower blood moon (see NOTE below) predicted for last Sunday night, but I didn’t have any serious plans to watch it. I am usually fast asleep before night-time events occur. But I happened to wake up about 10:00pm. (Yes, I know, most people weren’t yet in bed.) So I went outside on my driveway to watch, and I’m glad I did. I took many pictures as the lunar eclipse developed and the earth blocked the sun from hitting the moon. This is my favorite shot. There is still a sliver of moonlight showing before

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May is National Photo Month. Photographs are easier than ever to take and to share—with cell phones and social media we can record our lives by the day or by the minute. But will we remember what every snapshot depicts? The digital image might record the date and time of the picture. But unless we let a facial recognition program determine who is in the picture, we may forget who those people are. And unless we let our GPS post our location along with the photo, that, too, could get lost. Plus, the sheer number of pictures we take today

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It hasn’t been the best year for my flowering trees. My magnolia barely bloomed at all. But I caught this pink dogwood by my front porch on a nice, sunny day. Love the pink against the blue sky! What’s blooming at your place?

Last week I visited a small town in Missouri. The closest neighbors were out for their morning constitutional. We eyed each other warily. How do you get along with your neighbors?

It’s March Madness, and this always brings a memory to mind. My mother was an Oregon Ducks fan. She graduated from the University of Oregon, and she and my dad (a University of Washington grad) had a friendly rivalry throughout their lives. My mother was not a sports fan, but she always rooted for the Ducks. In 2013, my mother, who by then had Alzheimer’s Disease, was in assisted living. One of the activities for the residents was to fill out an NCAA bracket form. I doubt she had ever filled out an NCAA bracket before in her life. Still,

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I just got home from a walk in Anne Garney Park, a little jewel in Kansas City’s Northland with a two-mile paved trail. I was searching for signs of spring. The park is mostly prairie and scrubby woodlands, and most of the vegetation today was still dried grasses and seed pods from last year. I didn’t see much new growth except grass in damp places along the trail. But a few trees have budded enough to appear faintly green. Can you see the green?