In the summer, the dense greenery along the Potomac River covers houses, streets, and history.  We moved to the area in 1966 and slowly discovered some unexpected treasures--the towpath along the abandoned C & O canal, Sycamore Island, the old settlement of Cabin John, the Clara Barton house.  The Glen Echo Amusement Park. Read More

Crossing the bottleneck of a bridge required maneuvering through a tangle of feeder lanes, timing the rush hour, and most of all having good traffic karma. Read More

I remember when sex seemed like the border between childhood and becoming an adult, shrouded in mystery and myth, perhaps wonderful and exciting but also dangerous and distasteful.  Information was scant in my middle-America 1950’s childhood, but my mother managed to pre-empt more unreliable sources by explaining the basic “facts of life” in mildly appalling… Read More

A local brewery named itself “Bad Tattoo”, a good description of far too many skin decorations. Read More

There was surely some apprehension people felt while waiting for medical care, but people often chatted with the front desk or each other and in a small town, it wasn’t unusual to run into someone you knew. Read More

Beliefs about women’s health and the moon are particularly strong.  Read More

Maybe my mother did not have the shopping gene or never shook off the Depression and Protestant ethos, but she seems to have passed that shopping ambivalence on to me. Read More

You know this quote. Read More

How did I happen to read that book?  I don’t remember anyone giving it to me or seeing it in the house, so most likely it was in a school library, maybe thoughtfully displayed by a librarian, or maybe just calling to me from a shelf. In any case it was not like anything I had read and it spoke powerfully to my own adolescent yearning to make sense of existence. Read More

I still have a pang in my gut crossing any border, even when it should be benign.  Anything could happen in that liminal area. Read More