Tag Archives: Mary Lou Willis

Remembering “the love that let us share our name”

Here’s my Christmas surprise for 2014. I was throwing out boxes of obscure stuff when something made me dig through the trash one more time, searching for something I’d missed or lost. It was a photo of my mother and sister, Mary Lou and Diana. It must have been taken around this time in 1944. I know it was a difficult time in Lou’s life. She was a single mother worried about her soldier-husband’s fate somewhere in northern France as the war raged on. I hadn’t seen this image before; it astonishes me. How happy she looks! I offer it here for all her children and grandchildren as a token of “the love that let us share our name.” Continue reading






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In the Wake of Japan’s Earthquake & Tsunami

A ship is washed aground in Kamaishi City, Iwate, by the tsunami which followed the Japanese earthquake Source: Reuters/AJE] AJE Live blog: Japan earthquake | #earthquake






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Renoir’s Gift For My Mother’s Birthday

Auguste Renoir. A Girl with a Watering Can. 1876. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. This was my mother’s most cherished painting at the National Gallery of Art. We viewed it together several times in my youth. When work took … Continue reading






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You Gave Me a Mountain

One of the great scenes in my life, something like the great banquet scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, unfolded at my mother’s nursing home when an Elvis “stylist” crooned to us after the annual friends-and-family Thanksgiving dinner. Most of the ladies at our table, my mother included, didn’t know whether this Elvis was an impersonator or the real deal. But they remembered how to swoon.






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Renoir’s Gift For My Mother’s Birthday

Auguste Renoir. A Girl with a Watering Can. 1876. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. This was my mother’s most cherished painting at the National Gallery of Art. We viewed it together several times in my youth. When work took … Continue reading






Posted in Flaneur's Gallery, memoir | Tagged , , | 2 Comments