I went to Middlebury College expecting to become a Political Science major. I had law school as a possibility in my mind even as I started college. Or maybe I would be a French major and teach French—I had already concluded already that I would never speak French well enough […]
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A Tale of Two Trunks
When I went away to college at age seventeen, I took my mother’s college trunk with me. She had been given the trunk when she went to college in 1951. When she gave it to me in 1973, it had sat in the unfinished part of the basement in my […]
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Treasures and Trash: Down Memory Lane
In our decluttering plan, I assigned my husband to clean the basement. Most of the things down there are his, so that made sense to me. Plus, the unfinished portion of our basement is known for harboring large spiders, and I have arachnophobia. He has been slow to get to […]
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April Fool’s Day, 1975
I’ve never been one to play practical jokes. And I don’t like them played on me. But when I was at Middlebury College, I remember one April Fool’s trick I played on a professor. In the spring semester of 1975, I took a class from a professor who had intimidated […]
Continue readingOn Cats and Cat Pillows
On a chair in my guest room sit two handmade pillows with cats on them. Although I have owned dogs most of my married life, I really consider myself a cat person. But my husband is not. He wants dogs, only dogs. I embroidered one of the pillows when I […]
Continue readingFighting Fires: Now and Then
Many of the forest fires raging in the West this summer are not far from places I know—outside of Twisp and Omak and Okanogan near Lake Chelan in Washington State; Clark Fork near Lake Pend d’Oreille in the Idaho Panhandle; and other fires in Oregon. I remember fires from lightning […]
Continue readingKindergarten Show and Tell
My youngest sibling was in kindergarten the year I started college. When I came home from Middlebury College for Christmas my freshman year, this brother had a favor he wanted. “Would you come to Show and Tell with me?” he asked. “Okay,” I responded, somewhat surprised—why did I need to […]
Continue readingBefore the Good Ones Are Taken
I mentioned last week that I left home for college about the time my sister turned nine. She soon found out that she missed me more than she thought she would. Shortly after I arrived at Middlebury College, my sister wrote me a letter. I don’t have the letter any […]
Continue readingThe Summer Between High-School and College: A Giant Gap
There was a story on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition show on July 16, 2013, about “summer melt.” These are the students who say in spring when they graduate from high school that they are going to college in the fall, but they do not actually enroll when autumn comes. […]
Continue readingWorking Through the Generations: Happy 80th Birthday to My Father
I’ve written before that I am a lot like my mother. But I developed my attitudes toward work by watching my father. My earliest memories of my father at work date back to when I was in pre-school. When he was in graduate school earning his Ph.D. in metallurgy, he […]
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