Storytorch

Recently, before heading for the airport, I looked on my shelves for a book to take along. The volume I selected, 30 Stories to Remember, previously belonged to my mother.

A high school English teacher and, later in her life, a small-town newspaper publisher, my mother loved the printed word. She spent the last few of her 92 years sitting in a comfy chair rereading "Of This and That," the column she wrote each week for her newspaper for twenty years.

Published by Doubleday in 1962, 30 Stories is hard-covered and about two inches thick, not the best choice to haul around airports, but it came in handy. My flights were delayed, and so I enjoyed masterpieces by authors I have read before, such as "Two Soldiers" by William Faulkner and "The Split Second" by Daphne du Maurier. I'd never heard of Karl Decker, author of "The Theft of the Mona Lisa," or Walter D. Edmonds, who wrote the very entertaining "Courtship of My Cousin Doone."

I carted my book (too thick to fit in carry-on or purse) from Iowa to Indiana, where I lectured to quilters in Shipshewana. From Indiana, my book and I flew to Lincoln, Nebraska, for a meeting of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum advisory board, on which I sit. Along the way I read "The Soldier's Peaches" by Stuart Cloete and "How We Kept Mother's Day" by Stephen Leacock.

My husband Mark drove from Iowa to Nebraska to fetch me and, once home in Winterset, I soon realized I had forgotten 30 Stories to Remember!

On Saturday my three best friends and I road-tripped to Lincoln for an overnight stay, to dine, talk, sip wine, catch up with one another, see the quilt exhibits, and bring my mother's book home.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will tell a story.