By Nancy Patrick As I sat on my canopied swing in the backyard one Saturday morning in May, the soft breeze gently ruffled the leaves on the three-year-old burr oak tree near me. Another three-year-old tree, a Chinese Pistache, grows across the yard from the burr oak. Both trees are doing amazingly well for our Texas climate. We had to

By Nancy Patrick The older I get, the more I live in the past tense. I mean this, not a figurative statement, but one based in reality. Of course, at seventy-five-years of age, logic tells me that in all likelihood I have lived more than 75 percent of my life.  I know some people of my generation sadden when thinking

By Nancy Patrick I began thinking about this topic years ago as I ate lunch one day in Applebee’s in Waco. I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation between a mother and teenage daughter at a nearby table. As they discussed an upcoming family event’s guest list, the girl expressed her hope that her dad, who was divorced from her

By Nancy Patrick About two years ago, a friend asked me what “woke” meant. It just so happened that I had learned the new usage a couple of weeks before when I had read a magazine article about it. Modern language contains many new words and usages. As an English major and former English teacher, I find anything related to

By Nancy Patrick When I was a kid, some of my friends learned a funny fact in their biology class. They saw a chart that listed the percentages of all the elements in the human body and how much they would be worth monetarily (Human Body’s Worth).  I even found a website that lists the values of the human body’s

By Nancy Patrick When I taught composition as part of my language arts curriculum, I would allow the students to choose their own topics. Many times, they would tell me they couldn’t think of anything to write about. When that happened, I would present a list of possible subjects that should interest just about any student. Today, I find myself

By Nancy Patrick I have written several times this past year about how the road of my life has actually led  me down paths I had not planned to travel. On the last Sunday of January 2024, I fell in my home and fractured a vertebra—certainly not a planned event. This happened about a year after I had gone through

By Nancy Patrick My family greatly diminished on Friday, January 10, when my younger sister Peggy passed away. Our little family consisted of my parents, Henry (Buddy) and Norma Carr Smith, and the two girls. We began our lives together in Arkansas where my parents maintained their connections to the Carr family (most of whom remained in Arkansas) and the