When I was a kid my mother claimed that she could track me around the house by following the discarded cheese wrappers. In those days we classified cheese into two broad categories: mouse cheese (Kraft American cheese, in individually wrapped slices) and rat cheese (cheddar). It was mouse cheese that was my weakness and my […]
You can’t get there from here
Take a look at a map, and ask yourself, “How does a trip from Togiak to Craig, Alaska come to involve a hotel room in Renton, Washington?” It went down like this: I left Togiak on a Friday morning in time to catch my flight out of Dillingham. From there I stayed overnight in Anchorage […]
Convict season
I grew up living downstream (James River) from the Virginia state prison, aka the State Farm. This fact was known to create some excitement from time to time. I came home from school one day to find our yard full of state troopers and German shepherds. It seemed a convict had escaped, as they were […]
Dress code
When I was in elementary school, the girls wore dresses to school, because dresses were the proper attire for young ladies. I feel obliged to point out that the “young ladies” of my generation also liked to hang upside down on the monkey bars. Sometimes, Powhatan winters get very cold. If the temperature got down […]
The family chatterbox
As a child I adored Uncle Brooks. He moved to the farm before I was born and lived in a small house with no running water, right next to his woodshop, which was roughly twice the size of the house. I loved to visit because he would make blocks for me out of walnut scraps. […]
Fear of falling
One of my childhood friends who loved horses grew up to start a riding academy. It was a successful venture for her until tragedy did what tragedy sometimes does: one of the students died after falling off her horse during a lesson. I was already in Alaska by then, and my mother wrote me about […]
Of kelp farms and volcano snails
There is a saying in Latin that reads “Non nova sed novae.” When I came across this saying, I put my three years of high school Latin* to work in an effort to translate it. I came up with “Nothing new but news.” I couldn’t quite capture the essence of it, so I asked a […]
A plant for all seasons
This little cutie-pie is what we used to call a Christmas cactus. The flowers are lovely, and it doesn’t have a sharp edge anywhere. We had one of these when I was growing up. As the name implies, it was supposed to bloom at Christmas, but ours preferred the springtime. We took to laughingly calling […]
I love Latin class!
I took three years (yes, three) of Latin in high school. For the first year we studied lots of vocabulary, conjugated verbs and declined nouns. I don’t know if “declined” is the right word (it probably isn’t), but I use it because Latin nouns have inflected endings just like the verbs. Verbs belong to different […]
Ice and snow, but no midnight sun
Remember when John Carter* went to Mars, and the Tharks decided his name was “Virginia”? They would shout, “VAA-JINN-YAAA!” in their huge Thark voices. Carter would gently roll his eyes and say, “My name is John Carter. I am from Virginia.” “Yes!” The Tharks would shout, waving their four green arms with gleeful abandon. “VAA-JINN-YAAA!” […]