What to Do When it Snows

Action News is predicting snow, just a few flurries, but you never know. Could be a blizzard. When you go out for coffee, pick up a few ice scrapers and some salt. Truth is, no one else in the family will be prepared. Mention snow, but don’t harp. Find out who has to be where at what time. Place all of your gear on the porch and near the front door. Smoke your cigar.

The next morning, get up before everyone else. Go to Wawa and get some coffee. Come home. Scrape off all the cars. Your daughter has clinical and has to be at the hospital early, so do hers first and warm up her car so she isn’t cold on the way in. Better yet, decide to drive her and pick her up.

"Thanks for talking to me" was the author's father's catchphrase.

Shovel the driveway and sidewalk. Put down plenty of salt so no one slips. Keep going, up and down the street, until you run into other dads who are also shoveling snow and sprinkling salt so no one slips. Go to Wawa and get another coffee. Drink it there, while reading the paper for free. Help anyone who’s stuck. Wave goodbye to everyone at Wawa and say, “Thanks for talking to me.”

Go home. Drive your daughter to clinical. Don’t listen when she tells you to use the defrost. Keep wiping the windshield clear with your gloved hand. Drop her off. Think about those you know who can’t shovel their sidewalks, and go to their houses to help them.

- Mary Finnegan is a nurse and writer living in Philadelphia. She misses her father in so many ways - for the snow removal, the cigars, the rides, and especially the love. Thanks for talking to me.

How to Decorate

She never shies from an overblown chintz, an acid green, lattice over leaves on the lanai.

Too much, she says, is often just right.

"Take a page from Decorating is Fun!" she suggests, but (and this is the joke) "just one."

She's about coordinating fabrics and furniture suites, though by the end, her midcentury relics live alongside antiques and one-offs. She defies expectations by calling IKEA "ingenious" but never shops there.

There is a place for everything and everything’s in its place. If you ask, she will bring down a treasure, cradle it, let you see, before returning it to its permanent home.

She teaches in tiny doses. Rooms should have at least two colors, plus neutrals. Try gold accents, chinoiserie details, touches of black. In open spaces, tones should recur. 

A description of her city apartment overlooking the golf course: Expect More Peach.

I help with her last room – Split Singles in a Florida condo. Side-by-side beds like Lucy and Ricky's (Ernie and Bert's). My grandmother is over 80, and legally blind. We visit a store so I can finger the fabric for the bedspreads, describe the color, read tags aloud. It is vivid, but I struggle to verbalize the greeny-bluey truth of it. Not turquoise, not teal. It is the color you see in a peacock feather, ringing the indigo heart.

"Is it too much?" she asks, and finally, I know what to say.

It is just right.

- Jen Selk is a former journalist and occasional blogger. Past work can be found at the rarely-updated www.jenselk.com and she's active on social media under the handle @jenselk.

Her love of decor and decorating, learned at an early age, has spawned a online shop for vintage housewares and collectibles called Will & Bequeath, @willandbequeath.  

How to Properly Dry and Fold Cloth Diapers: A Tutorial in Several Steps

Be a nine-year-old girl in the 50’s with a new baby sister and a mama with a clothesline that stretches the length of the yard.  There’s a pole to make the line taller, you have to have that pole because if you don’t the line will hang low from the weight of the wet clothes which will drag in the dirt.

The author, with clothesline pole

Keep the wooden clothespins in a handmade bag that you will never leave outside for fear of bees nesting inside or birds shitting on the pins. 

The basket will be huge and very heavy and your mama will carry it.

Hang the Birdseye diapers together.  (All items must always be hung with like items.)  

What’s a Birdseye diaper?

Oh, the one with the straight edges. 

Why do some have rickrack edges and are longer? 

Just made that way.

Use separate pins for quick drying, hang side by side as the laundry has to flow.

Bring inside for folding.  No clean laundry will ever sit in a basket even though in the future laundry will sit in baskets for days and sometimes weeks, even though there will be entire generations born who do nothing but move clean clothing unfolded from basket directly onto waiting children, for now the laundry will be folded.

Fold diapers like this: 

- sides meet in middle

- fold back end down

Girls pee backwards, she says.  It’s why she likes these diapers best: they’re thicker in the middle. 

Hope that American Bandstand is still on.

- Linda Poore is a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, daughter (of dead people) and friend to a few.  She is retired and spends many hours dog walking while recalling life events (of dead people.)  She worries that when she’s gone no one will know her stories.  (But it really doesn’t matter.)  She lives in Virginia with her husband and her poodle, Penny Poore.