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The storied history of the ‘loveseat’

When I was a little kid, my Aunt Dorothy had a very interesting piece of wicker-ware furniture in her home. It was a two-person, sofa-like creation in the rough shape of an 'S.' My brothers and I thought it was great fun to play on it because the seats of the sofa faced in opposite directions. We loved to play pretend that it was our rickshaw or our stagecoach. One of us would be the 'driver,' clucking to our Wells Fargo horses, while the other faced away and pretended to be an oil baron smoking cigars.

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Get your hands dirty with this old, delicious July 4th treat

Back when I was a little lass, the Fourth of July was an occasion almost as important - well, just as important, I'd say - as Christmas. Christmastime was all well and good, of course, but the Fourth of July was an extra important date because it was the time of the big family reunions when I was a kid. My extended family on my Daddy's side always held their big reunion - or 'Homecoming,' as we always called it - on the week of the Fourth of July. Kids were out of school. The general bustle of the end of the school season was over and Daddy's venerable army of cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces were readily able to come from hither and yon to Coffee County, Alabama.

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Learning to drive with Momma and ‘The Beach Boys’

The very first car I ever learned to drive was a indigo-blue Toyota Corolla. Now, I am - and was - the sort of person who really can't walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. So, at the tender age of seventeen, I certainly had my doubts about mastering the fine art of operating an automobile. And I had good reason to. I was a driver's ed flunky. I just naturally got my right and left mixed up most times. Now, add in that my extreme anxiety around any sort of traffic and it was a recipe ripe for failure.

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