Category: Essay
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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…
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For Only a Soupçon of Effort
As I write this, it is currently 30° here in Rockville, Maryland. We had our first snow of the season today, just a scattering that fluttered down, most melting upon hitting the ground, but some managing to stick and cling to the naked tree branches in my yard. When I took my dog out for…
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Color My World
Recently I was reading the latest issue of Writer’s Digest magazine when I came across an interview with Drew Daywalt, who was featured on the cover. I had not yet heard of him (sorry, Mr. Daywalt) but the image of his two children’s books on the first page of the article caught my eye so…
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The Art of Creating
One week ago today I posted my last essay in my “essay a week for one year” project that I started on New Year’s Eve 2014. At the time of posting my last essay “More Questions than Answers”, I was unsure of my next step for my Cajun Girl in a Kilt website. Shortly after…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 