All Blog Posts Tagged 'linda' (20)

Our early and mild spring weather has given us beautiful flowers this year. My back patio is a fragrant experience with roses and iris blooming right now.

When my yellow iris shows it first bloom, I think of the old cemetery that is on the top hill of one of our family’s pasture. There hasn’t been anyone buried there for decades, but years ago someone planted…

We’re in the process of building our own house, doing almost all of the work ourselves. This week I’ve been pounding in nails on wall edging, and taping and mudding sheet rock. My finger joints and wrists feel like they could break off as they are so tired and sore.

But then I think of this diary entry from Butter in the Well…

April 25,…

Last week I mentioned Aunt Julia who grew up in the same house as I did, and married Joe Olson, the boy “next door”.

Joe’s parents, Peter and Hannah, lived in a dugout before building this house featured with this blog. (A larger home was built on their farm before I was born, so I was never in the original home.)

We were frequent visitors to Joe and Aunt Julia Olson’s house…

I’ve been going through old photos recently and sorting them (and my memories) by the decades they were taken. It’s interesting to see the old “Butter in the Well” house in the background. They were all snapshots of everyday life at that moment, and now so many memories…

The first home on the “Butter in the Well” homestead was a dugout. Two years later in 1870, the Svensson family built the first section of their wood-frame house. They added on at least two more times over the next two decades.

Here are excerpts from Butter in…

I’m 58 years old today and thinking about my childhood home where I celebrated birthdays for eighteen years until I started college.

We celebrated birthdays during breakfast, complete with cake and opening of our presents before we got on the school bus.

The earliest birthdays I remember was my 5^th birthday party with hats and friends, and marking off the…

Our family doesn’t have a photo of the original dugout dug in 1868 that was on the “Butter in the Well” farm, so here’s a photo from Kansas Memory to give you a visual view to contemplate while reading a passage from my book …

(This post is currently featured on The Quilting Gallery, so be sure to read it to see more photos and enter in the contest to win an ebook copy of Butter in the Well …

One of my grade school classmates died suddenly this week from some yet-unknown health issue. Eventually, after the autopsy is finished, family and friends will know what struck down the man liked by so many, but now all we can do is just wonder—and remember.

He was the class clown, often times the start of mischief in our boisterous large class of almost thirty students (all in one room those days).

In his adult life people knew him as a family man, auctioneer, their kid’s…

I love looking at old photos collected on historical  internet sites like KansasMemory.org. One of the most famous photos, that of a woman gathering cow chips, depicts the typical life of a pioneer woman in many people’s minds.

Here’s this woman, stuck out on the Western Kansas plains, with…

We had a warm sunny day this week, so I pulled out a tub of quilts I inherited from Lois, my mother-in-law. They had been stored in a cedar chest, made as a high school project by her future husband back in about 1925.

I spread a white tablecloth on the driveway and unfolded the first quilt. The double wedding band quilt is a beautiful display of color, stitching,…

Need to finish your Christmas shopping? Or maybe start your shopping?

I heard from one reader that bought…

(This month I’m posting excerpts from my books and telling you the story behind them.)

I remember several floods while growing up on the farm I featured in my Butter in the Well book series.

The creek runs through the middle of the farm, with the river on the west border. Most times the creek is dry, but it can flood quickly as…

Elaine Masters host of the women’s radio show Gathering Roads interviews adventure-travel writer Linda Ballou. In just 15 minutes you learn what makes Linda want to stretch her limits, and why she is in such a hurry to get to as many beautiful places she can before they are gone. Just in from rafting…

Join me on the descent to the grandest canyon of all! Even though this article is a posted column on the National Association of Baby Booomer Women’s site, the raft through the Grand Canyon is a journey that can be enjoyed by anyone. All you need to bring on…

Outdoor fun in Florida - it sounds like so much fun - A good friend of mine, travel writer and author Linda Ballou has had her article featured in Real Travel Adventures.

A three-mile causeway from Fort Meyers across San Carlos Bay…

My Stitch of Courage book features Maggie Kennedy Pieratt, my gre at-great grandmother. She was orphaned at age three, and eventually sent to the Territory Kansas in the late 1850s to live with her brothers.

As a young woman, and arriving in the…

I began my research and I have a made a few choices. I am going to comment however, on the selection process.  So, I have my list of authors and I go to the Amazon site and start looking and the available choices. The first is fairly easy, Nora Roberts, I am going to read “Spellbound”. Number two was a little more difficult, Karen Robards, my choice is “Pursuit”.…