Katherine Center's Blog

One of the most perfect, delectable, romantic movie scenes ever.

Happy holidays.

Posted in random, videos Tagged: Donna Reed, It's A Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart, love scenes, movie clip

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I can never find the phone.  Ever.  I spend about half my day circling the house, looking for a ringing cordless. But it's not there. It's buried under something. But I don't know what.

I don't know why I can't remember to put it back on the base when I'm done talking.  But I can't.

So I just bought a wall phone from the '70s.

Just found it online.  It's exactly like the phone that hung in my kitchen for my entire childhood and beyond.  When my mother sold my childhood home, she took the phone...

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Down here in Texas, we have to work hard to create winter.

It's not really a season in Houston, exactly.  It's more like a series of fronts that blow the heat away for a few months, a couple of days at a time.

So holiday decorations have a kind of make-believe quality.  Like we're pretending it's winter.  We're insisting it's winter, dammit.  And the whole city has to work together as a group to pull it off.  And we're going to make cider and feel cozy even if we have to run the air...

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I have one of those moms who's a superhero.  There is nothing she can't handle.  She should have been the President, and I'm not kidding.

But then I never would have gotten to see her.  And I love to see her.  So it was a good deal for me that she wasn't the President.  But I'm not sure it was a great deal for the world.

She just had her 50th high school reunion, and she pulled out a bunch of old photos.  Here are a few. I could flip through her old photo albums all day long.

 

Posted in crazy...

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I've been feeling feisty lately.  The brouhaha over Publishers Weekly's Top Ten books of 2009 — which had no women authors on it — has left me thinking a lot about women's place in our cultural conversation.  

And, as I've been driving my carpools and snaking the grocery store aisles, I've been composing an essay about it — fully aware of the irony that my life as a busy mom was going to make it pretty much impossible for me to ever write that essay.  

But then I remembered I'd already written...

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I stumbled on this little moment in our old home movies over the weekend and couldn't believe how sweet it was.  And so I made this video.

(I'm the little blond sister, by  the way…)

Posted in news!

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It's my 9-year wedding anniversary this week.  (Nine years married, fifteen together.) And so, a nine-best ode to my awesome husband.  Here are nine great things about him — though, really, I could go on and on:

9.  The mustache.

8.  The pants. 

7.  The way he is so completely stoked to have a wife who's a writer.

6.  The way he wrestles with our kids.  And reads to them endlessly.  And plays soldiers.  And takes them to the library. 

5. The way he's completely exhausted at the end of the day...

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I spoke on a panel last weekend at the Texas Book Festival with the very charming Jancee Dunn, who has a baby.  Fellow panelist and Houston author Gwendolyn Zepeda and I wound up giving her parenting advice.  And while we were talking, I heard myself say something very true.  It can be so easy to second-guess the parenting choices you've made — but there is one thing I know for sure we got right: Audiobooks.

As babies, both my kids hated the car.  Like, any time I drove anywhere for the first...

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Here's another before and after.

A really awesome mod chair from my grandfather's building materials company that I snagged from my mom's garage a few weeks ago:

And now, in my living room, freshly back from the upholsterer's:

I've kinda fallen in love with this chair, but it didn't happen until after it got its makeover.  When I first brought it to my house, I really couldn't see past the dust and the broken springs.  But I had a theory that the chair would clean up well, and so, out of...

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Last spring, the amazing Mary Swenson took these photos for me in response to a quote I sent her from Everyone Is Beautiful.  She broke the quote down by sentences, and took a photo for each one.  Then we ran the photos in sequence and made a video.  But the photos are so amazing, they deserve a place of their own.  In the video, they disappear fast and it's on to the next image.  I've been meaning to put up these luscious stills for months, and now that I'm finally doing it, I am completely...

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