By NANCY PATRICK I love my lifestyle as a homebody. I prefer to stay home rather than get out and about with other people. As a matter of fact, the COVID pandemic gave me the perfect excuse to avoid church, shopping, visiting friends and family, and volunteering in the community. I didn’t have to offer excuses or reasons for my

By NANCY PATRICK I try to write an article every other week for Spirit of Abilene. I usually write reflective essays, but over the weekend I wrote something new. Rather than an essay, I wrote a lengthy list of questions regarding many subjects that interest me. After each question, I wrote a short response expressing my own opinions and thoughts

By NANCY PATRICK Nothing in life is more precious, valuable, fulfilling, cherished, frustrating, complex, and heartbreaking than family. Nothing brings out the negative sides of family more than illness and death.  Only four people comprised my nuclear family—mom, dad, two daughters.  Four years older than my sister, Peggy, I lived with our parents four years before she entered the picture,

By NANCY PATRICK With only two human genders, one would think differentiating between them would be simple. To the contrary, defining the male and female sexes in modern times has become quite difficult. It has grown into fodder for political, moral, ethical, biological, and religious debates. During this March of 2022, I am especially aware of the unique and complex

By NANCY PATRICK I grew up in an era when people talked about shame and understood it. Today’s permissive culture tends to excuse bad behavior in an effort to avoid appearing prejudiced or judgmental. Although past generations may have taken too severe an approach to shaming people guilty of committing social taboos, modern societies seem to have gone overboard in

By NANCY PATRICK Have you ever had to eat your words? I certainly have. I learned pretty early in parenting that I should avoid saying, “My kid would never do that.” Mastery of that lesson takes time and discipline, but it helps parents avoid future embarrassment.  I don’t think I said I would “never” regarding very many other issues, but

By NANCY PATRICK Do you remember reading George Orwell’s novel 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?  When I first read them in 1968, the predictions of future society seemed farfetched; however, much later as I taught literature students through three and a half decades, I realized that many of the predictions had actually happened or would soon manifest themselves.

By NANCY PATRICK Most people consider me a nice person. Lately, I’ve wondered if that description still aptly applies to me because I certainly don’t always have nice thoughts.  Could I blame it on the social pressures with COVID during the past two years or my advancing age producing less patience than I used to have? For whatever reason, I

By NANCY PATRICK As we near the end of 2021 and begin the new year of 2022, we have a time for reflection—reflection on what has happened and what may happen in the future. I struggle to discern the difference between importance and irrelevance. I sometimes get busy or distracted and become bogged down in peripheral things. The older I