Author: michardillo
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Reflection and Renovation
Exciting news for me! One of my essays, Reflection and Renovation, made the front page of a local regional newspaper that publishes news about our area’s Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Washington. As this is a newspaper for parents, faculty, and students of Catholic schools, this essay has a spiritual theme based on the…
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The Elephant in the Room
As my regular readers may know, I have always been a cat person although currently I am the catless owner of an eight-year-old Maltipoo named Puccini. In fact, my very first essay published on Cajun Girl in a Kilt was “License to Carry”, a tongue-in-cheek essay about Puccini’s reluctance to go up and down the…
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Iron-Gray Magnolia
William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” has always intrigued me. When completing course work for my certification in secondary education, this somewhat dark tale of a Southern belle was part of the syllabus for a course on the short story as a type of fiction. Of the thirty short stories covered in that…
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Girl Power
It’s mid-third quarter of this school year and I am knee-deep teaching two novels set in England nearly six hundred years apart. The 7th grade is reading Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman, the diary of a girl in medieval times during the reign of Edward I, covering the span of one year of her…
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It All Started with a Lemon
We’ve had quite a winter so far, with the evidence of our January blizzard still on display in our yards and parking lots. Today’s unseasonably warm temperatures are supposed to help with that. Just this week, however, on Tuesday we had yet another snow day (our seventh so far) from school due to ice and…
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Together Forever
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today is the 28th Valentine’s Day my husband and I have celebrated together and we graced it with a nice day at home and then dinner out at a local French bistro. As usual, our gifts to one another were small tokens marking the day. I received a lovely bouquet of flowers…
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Travel for Beginners
I know almost nothing about soy sauce. I know I like to dip my sushi rolls into it and I know that the colored tops of the soy sauce bottles on the tables in Asian restaurants denote whether the soy sauce is regular (red) or low sodium (green). I know it is one of the…
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The White Hills of Rockville
Author’s Note: Some of my more liberal-minded readers might not agree with my positions in this essay, and that’s okay. Read or don’t read, the choice is yours, these views are mine. In the words of General Douglas MacArthur: “Last, but by no means least, courage-moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 