What she will do with that enormous house, which seems to me mired in the past, will surely be different from what my parents did with it in the 1940’s and 50’s, when its prime function was to serve as a weekend roost for drunken Derby guests, who terrified me with their antics.
Writers, French Women and French Bookstores
We have an obligation to be fearless, never leaving out “the good parts,” those hidden parts of lives that are of most interest to all of us: it is in “the good parts” that the essence of a human life is often revealed.
The Blue Box Debuts: First Public Reading!
There are moments in life that are so precious, so sweet, that years later they still ring like a set of silver chimes.
My Mother’s Hat — The Blue Box
I have the historian’s skeptical view of the past and of the vestal virgins who attend it so assiduously. Their reverence seems to depend on a net of lies and denials. But when I touch the soft feathers of my mother’s hat, preserved for seventy years, I understand a little of what the other women in the family feel.
Bingham Estate, Louisville KY
I don’t usually call it the Bingham Estate but just the big house, which gives it the same moniker as SingSing; but when big news breaks, the big name seems appropriate.
On The Blue Box
The Blue Box does not share the soft glow that softens the details of so many family histories; its light approaches a glare.
Digging Up The Bones – The Blue Box
As I prepare for publication next month, I face the daunting task of listing all the material I’ve used in The Blue Box, many letters, speeches, bills of sale, wills and genealogies that were stored in the blue box itself.
Mother Mary — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
She remains for me a difficult and challenging example of what a woman of character who makes good choices can become.
Naming Names — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
I realized today…that I never heard anyone in my family or outside of it mention my material grandmother, Sallie Montague Lefroy. This seems particularly strange since it seems I was named for her—seems because no one ever mentioned that either, but since we are both called Sallie Montague, it seems likely that I was named for her—and I am the only one of five siblings given a name from my mother’s family rather than my father’s.
Helena’s Story — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
As I prepare to let go of the previous trove of letters that make up the body of my next book, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, and that detail the lives of my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, from 1850 to 1931, I realize that I am most fond of my grandmother, Helena Caperton Lefroy, or at least of her memory.