to my home on the Web. Drop into my virtual parlor for a chat in BC-MOO, where I hang out a lot during the school year.

family, reading and writing, and local history.

Family

I live with my daughters and cats in an old farmhouse in Mt. Solon, VA.

Mary is a senior at Bennington College in Vermont, where she majors in Art and makes children's books. She plans to pursue her Master's degree in Children's Literature at Hollins University in 2002. She's a great vegan cook!

Natalie is a first-semester sophomore at Mary Baldwin College this spring, planning a major in Art or Communications. She has a role in The Vagina Monologues, appearing Thursday, 3/14, through Saturday, 3/16.

We're great fans of Shenandoah Shakespeare, and Natalie likes to usher at their new Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton. We sing second alto in Daughters of Song, a women's choir based in Harrisonburg, VA. Our spring performance will be on Saturday, 4/20. We don't watch television at all, but we're movie addicts. Natalie's interested in screenwriting and filmmaking, especially after a brief stint on location for Gods and Generals with her uncle, a pyrotechnician.

We keep taking in cold and hungry cats, whom we feed, worm, immunize, neuter, and occasionally send to nice new homes. If you want a young calico cat, who wants to be someone's only cat, please let us know!

I grew up in a family of history buffs, who've moved south from our family home in Western PA, but we keep a family summer home at Canadohta Lake. We all read history for pleasure, but by profession, Jim is a nurseryman in Baltimore and Chuck a prof of Geology at Georgia Southern University. My pseudofamily-member Marge lives in a Pennsylvania farmhouse associated with author Margaret Sutton, who wrote the Judy Bolton series.

I'm part of a musical family. Both my brothers are talented guitar players, while my girls and I bang away on a baby grand or a church organ. Mary has recently taken up the mandolin.

The Books I'm (Re)reading This Spring

Children's/Young Adult

• Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
• Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising Series
• Ann Brashares' Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
• Mel Glenn's novels in poems

See my YA Lit page for other favorite YA authors.

Adult Authors

• Jane Austen (I read through all her novels again every couple years.)
• Virginia Woolf
• Iris Murdoch
• Kate O'Brien
• Ian McEwan
• E. M. Forster
• Alexandre Dumas pere

Some of my all-time favorite authors are

• Charlotte Bronte
• Emily Bronte
• Emily Dickinson
• Edith Wharton
• Tom Robbins
• William Gibson
• Kazuo Ishiguro
• Gerald Stern
• Mary Oliver
• Leslie Marmon Silko
• Toni Morrison
• Lee Smith

I also enjoy novels by A.S. Byatt, whose Possession is a wonderful read for devotees of Victorian literature.

Poem of the Month

History: A Personal View

• The Shenandoah Valley
• Civil War Sites

Recently transplanted from Western Pennsylvania, I love the Shenandoah Valley, even though I sometimes miss Pittsburgh landmarks.

My great-great grandfather was wounded at Petersburg in 1864 and returned to New York State, later to move west to Ohio. Shrapnel was still emerging from his head wound at the turn of the century, making for a local-interest story in his hometown (Jefferson, Ohio) newspaper.

I'm descended from John Howland, the "lusty young man" who fell off the Mayflower into the Atlantic but, fortunately for me, was rescued and arrived in New England safe and sound, where he would marry Elizabeth Tilley. One of their granddaughters married into the Lovell family, who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. My grandmother, herself a Lovell, traced the genealogy in the 1930s.

While I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, I'm an admirer of local heroes. I enjoy local author John Heatwole's writing about the War and Valley folklore, and it's difficult to live in the Valley without learning to admire Stonewall Jackson. Some of my recent reading in children's/young adult literature has centered on the War: Elaine Marie Alphin's The Ghost Cadet, set in New Market, and Virginia Hinkin's 1959 novel, Stonewall's Courier. I've recently joined the Augusta County Historical Society.

I enjoy learning more about Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. (Support the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which maintains Montpelier.) But most of my real heroes are women, from Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison on.

I love the community of which I've become a part. On Fridays I read The Washington Post for Valley Voice, a reading broadcast service for the blind and print-impaired. Please consider contributing your services. I'm also a member of Amnesty International.