by Leslie Sholly | Sep 26, 2017 | Catholicism, Everyday Ediths, family, FIRE, The South
“Blood is thicker than water,” was one of my maternal grandmother’s favorite sayings. Family was everything to her. She was extremely proud of her Southern and Irish roots, and often shared tales—possibly apocryphal—of the family history. We are blessed to have...
by Leslie Sholly | Aug 29, 2017 | Catholicism, Everyday Ediths, Uncategorized
I sat at my desk, head down, long hair hiding my face. On the blue folder in front of me, in Catholic-school cursive, I wrote the word miserable over and over again, covering the folder in a graphite cri de couer, addressed to no one in particular. I was in the...
by Leslie Sholly | Aug 22, 2017 | Catholicism, linkups, Notre Dame, photoblogging, Spring Hill
A couple of years ago I started creating quotation images of the Blessed Mother to share on my blog’s Facebook page during the month of May. I’ve been meaning to gather them into one post, and this month’s CWBN blog hop, with a theme of Mary, My...
by Leslie Sholly | Aug 14, 2017 | Genealogy, Politics, The South
I was eight years old, curled up on the naugahyde sofa in my grandmother’s basement, when I found my great-grandmother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, the commemorative movie edition. I read it literally to pieces and I can recite the entire first...
by Leslie Sholly | Aug 7, 2017 | Gardening, home decor, shopping, sponsored
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post, y’all. But as always, compensated or not, my opinions are my own. I don’t buy many things for me or for my home. Losing everything when my house burned down forced me into a minimalism that I’ve found hard to...
by Leslie Sholly | Jul 29, 2017 | family, Vacations
Would you believe until last year I had never spent a night in Kentucky? I’ve driven through it on the way to points North, unsurprisingly, but somehow went almost 50 years without vacationing in a state I can drive to in an hour. We remedied that last October...
by Leslie Sholly | Jul 24, 2017 | shopping, sponsored, us family guide, Vacations
OK, y’all, so I only JUST got back from a short vacation (about which more later!), and I’m already wishing I had known what I am about to share with you before I planned it! I don’t know about you but when it comes to traveling, I am always looking...
by Leslie Sholly | Jul 22, 2017 | family, Vacations
By the time this is published it will have been almost a year since our week in Minnesota–St. Paul, to be exact–where we stayed with our friends Renee and Erik and their daughter, Mikaela. Some background: Renee and I were roommates all four years in...
by Leslie Sholly | Jul 18, 2017 | Catholicism, family, Parenting
When I was a little girl, I hated going to Mass. My father wasn’t Catholic, and we all know how hard it is to take little kids to Mass. So for the first six years of my life, I mostly stayed home on Sundays with Daddy. Sometimes we’d drop my mother off...
by Leslie Sholly | Jul 13, 2017 | Catholicism, Deep Thoughts, Everyday Ediths
Growing up, one of my most prized possessions was my Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. One of those massive volumes you see (or used to) at the library, it was very expensive, and my grandmother bought it for me so that I could look up pronunciations for...