I read an article recently, on how to get rid of mice. The last sentence said something about not letting the little rodents get to you too much, and to remember that we humans are bigger than them. It is easy to feel helpless or overwhelmed when mice invade your home. The truth is that […]
One of the less charming aspects of living in an old house is the attraction mice have for them, and the ease at which they enter. So many cracks, holes, nooks, crannies! When you have mice in your house, it is incredibly tempting to go into denial about it all. It is completely understandable that you don’t […]
I’ve got mice on my mind. I realized that I have so many metaphors for the mouse/human dynamic, that I need four installments. Stay tuned!
It took me a long time to learn how to drive a car with manual transmission. With automatics, you just put the car in “drive” and off it goes, but manual brings many wonderful nuances to driving. I learned that the car needs to reach a certain speed before I could shift up to […]
I am not a great bowler; in fact, I’m pretty terrible, so I am well acquainted with the gutter ball. I often throw the ball, and it veers to one side, flirts with and then hooks up with the gutter. I notice that during the veering stage, I mentally and physically try to reverse the […]
When I was growing up, I played on a soccer team with just about every other girl in the area. It took me a while to understand the concept of defense, which is where I spent most of my time. One day, the ball came flying at me rather fast, and there was no one […]
When I lived in Oregon, I went tubing once on the McKenzie River which has both calm and choppy parts. It is wide enough to hold both simultaneously as you float down the river. This was the first time I’d tubed, and I was quite afraid of the choppy bits, so I very much wished […]
Last spring, I noticed something about how I viewed my garden. After a long day, I would walk around and look at the plants. This sounds relaxing on paper, but I was looking at the plants that weren’t there yet, or the weeds that I hadn’t gotten to yet, or a fungus here, an aphid […]
Once when I was young, my best friend and I were walking around the city. A woman came up to us, all smiles and warmth, and handed us a couple of smiley face buttons. We, being innocent, smiled back, and accepted the buttons. Then she started in on us, trying to sell us on being […]
Growing up in my neighborhood, everybody threw rocks at each other at some point, or had rocks thrown at them. It was an epidemic. One thing that we learned, though, was that once someone had been hit, the offending rock thrower had to apologize and bring some kind of gift as a means of making […]