Month: December 2006

Snow! Glorious snow! Christmas of 2006 will definitely be white one for those of us who got hit with the blizzard. I just finished reading a news article about how thousands of airline passengers are stuck at the airport in Denver. My own dad and his wife have extended their stay in Mexico because they can't get a flight into Denver. Stuck in Mexico...could be worse fates, I think. But thinking of all those people longing to get home to their loved ones by Monday reminds me of a Christmas Eve many years ago when I was stranded in an airport due to inclement weather. I was young...was I even 20? I've traveled a lot...years blur and in the end, don't matter anyway. What I remember most is feeling depressed at the prospect of spending the holiday without my family or boyfriend, who was in the Marines (and still is, actually) and had gotten leave so we could spend a few...

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I've been thinking a lot about a little girl I once knew back in my early childhood in Wisconsin. Tina was the youngest of four daughters, the eldest of whom had died before I ever knew them. I was friends with Sandy, the sister who was a year or two older than me. And I knew Suzy, who was already grown (at least in my eyes, she was; could be she was only in high school, but I think she was older than that). At any rate, though Sandy was technically my friend, it is little Tina who fills my memories. Tina was several years younger than I. Mostly I played with her because she was Sandy's little sister, and our moms made us play with her. I remember feeling most days rather ambivalent toward Tina. I found her annoying (much as Tavi finds Bella, Tucker finds Tavi, and Max finds Tuck). She cried a lot....

As I sit here at the kitchen table, steaming mug of coffee to my left, glorious Christmas tree to my right, I hear a rattling sound. I turn in the direction from which it's coming, and all I can figure is that my Deep Rock water supply is thawing and making wierd noises. Sometimes the cooler "talks" and startles me. It always happens at night, when the kids are in bed and all is quiet. From the dark recesses of the kitchen, buzzing. But that's not what I'm hearing right now. It's as if someone is knocking on the walls of my house. And then I realize--someone is! I had poured birdseed into a wall-mounted feeder earlier this week, and if I turn my head and glance out to the back patio, I see birds everywhere. They've found my treat for them. Some are fluttering their wings madly, attempting to get every last morsel from the feeder. There's nothing unusual about birds...

Last July, I wrote a column that hit a nerve with our illustrious school board and certain members of our community whose teenage boys vandalized the high school but then managed to dodge the punishment of expulsion. That punishment was in keeping with school district policy and was supported by the high school principal as well as the interim superintendent and others. In that column, I voiced my opinion of what went down in that situation: The parent of one of those boys is an influential and wealthy developer here in Windsor, and he used his clout and power to see to it that his son did not have to (fairly) pay for his crime. And of course, he generously used that same clout to give the other boys the same treatment because otherwise, what would that look like? It was ugly. It was unjust. It was corrupt. And I still maintain that this is what happened. School board member Cathy...