Surfacing

At last, I’ve come up for air.  Oh, how sweet it tastes!  I’ve felt my lungs burning—bursting with the spent carbon dioxide of a summer of toil—and here, finally, is my grand exhale.  And as I float here on the other side of my recent travails, I know this long, hypoxic journey was worth it.  […]

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I Won My Own Planet (Sort Of)!!!

Coming into this week, I expected a lot of things.  Receiving an award wasn’t one of them.  I expected to be tired.  I expected to be stressed.  It’s the first week of the annual summer day camp I oversee, and faced with thirteen-hour workdays from now until the beginning of August, I expected to put […]

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Snails or “Thirty-Seven Gallons of Terror”

Swallowing hard, I caught the scream rising in my throat and replaced it with a terrified gasp.  From the vantage point on his green micro-fiber throne, Prince Luca opened one yellow eye and glared accusingly as I stepped backward.  Deciding I was in no real danger—and that my interruption of his sleep could be forgiven—he […]

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How To Become an Accident(al) Farm Hand

Call it the butterfly effect.  Call it whatever you like; sometimes life’s seemingly insignificant twists and turns carry a big impact.  If you’d told me two years ago I’d be spending one day a week on a farm, I’d have said you’re crazy.  But accidents happen, and sometimes they result in pounds of tomatoes and […]

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Fifty Words for Rain

It is rumored that the Eskimo had fifty words for snow—you know, a word for the big fat flakes, and for the little tiny ones that don’t amount to much, for the driving blizzards and the gentle, sound-muffling windless storms.  I have not independently verified this, but I’d like to believe it’s true. I love […]

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