Free Republic

In September 2001, I bought the lot, covered in trees and so thick with brush you couldn’t walk through it. I cleared the land myself. We built the house in 2002, moving in on Labor Day. The columns on the front porch were my ex-wife’s excellent idea. My father died four days after we moved in and I never got to show it to him. My oldest daughter, age 11 when we moved here, entered adolescence and then womanhood in this home. I met her nervous first dates on that porch. When my youngest daughter was born, I carried...

Vice President Joe Biden drew on the sorrow of his own personal losses as he addressed the memorial marking 11 years since United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a Pennsylvania field. "It is a bittersweet moment for the entire nation," Biden told families, friends and dignitaries gathered at the memorial to the 40 passengers and crew who died on Sept. 11, 2001. "We wish we didn't have to be here, wish we didn't have to commemorate any of this," he said, drawing on his own sudden loss, when his first wife and young daughter just before Christmas in 1972. "I...

The Golden Alumni of Pine Bush NY hold an annual fete for each class that graduated 50 or more years ago. I went to the reunion yesterday.

What was supposed to be a fun family vacation for John "Jay" Rosenberry turned into a nightmare when his son and daughter and two others struggled to get out of a riptide that was pulling them out to sea. Rosenberry, a Tucson resident, was honored last week by the U.S. Coast Guard for saving the lives of his children, as well as that of another young boy. He received the Silver Lifesaving Medal at a ceremony in Virginia on Friday — nearly two years after the incident occurred July 24, 2006, at Portsmouth Island, just off the coast of North...