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Silent Legacies
There are stories that we will never be privy to.
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The Leatherman
When I was little and living in Connecticut, I’d hear stories about vagabonds who lived in caves thereabouts. Vagabonds always fascinated me. Didn’t they get lonely? How did they survive the winters? Were they dangerous? I bet they had a lot of stories to tell. I certainly could relate to wanting a whole lot of…
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A Thousand Points of Feminism
In a country in which women earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns, in a culture where only 61 percent of absentee fathers actually pay child support, it stuns me how quiet the women’s movement has become. Feminism seems to be an epithet, a label to be avoided. Even worse are those people…
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Sorry Robert
When I was 9 years old and living in Avon, Connecticut, there was this boy in the neighborhood named Robert Russo who was, frankly, the bane of my existence. He would tease me and pick on me incessantly. I tried to avoid him as much as I could. One day I was playing in front of my…
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Rooting for the Home Team
When I was 10 years old I moved from my waspy, upper middle class New England house and wound up living in a tent in the rural South. It was quite the culture shock. But the biggest shock of all was finding myself in a public school where only 1 percent of the students looked…
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The Attack of the Killer Lionfish Bug
When I think of the moment in my life when I’ve been the most terrified, I am transported back in my mind to the time when I was 8 years old and playing in a field next to our house in Connecticut. It was a beautiful summer’s day, and I was enjoying the sunshine. Then…
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The Climate of my Childhood
The first 10 years of my life I lived in Connecticut. After that we moved to Florida, with its foreign, subtropical climate and 3 inch long cockroaches. I always felt as if I were in a third world country. This would never feel like “home” to me. Now I’m in Seattle, and the climate is…
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A Floridian Gets Snowed Upon
I woke up the other day to discover that the world was covered in a white powdery substance that I hadn’t seen in 30 years. It instantly transported me back to my childhood in Connecticut. I wanted to turn on the radio to see if my school was having a snow day. We moved to…
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Nature Calls
I love to observe nature as it unfolds around me, and I’ve moved from a subtropical climate to a temperate one, so a lot has changed. I don’t even recognize many of the bird calls here, and I’m sure encountering plant life that I’ve never seen before. It some ways Washington reminds me a lot…
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Floridation
Yes, I spelled that the way I intended to. This isn’t a rant on fluoride. (And that is a controversial topic. Fluoride is a very toxic chemical, but at the same time putting it in water has drastically reduced infant mortality rates and… I digress.) No, the topic for today is how I stick out…