Sometimes I miss the city. Like yesterday, when we had to drive over twenty miles to a Maine city for our weekly or bi-weekly stock up. What I save on grain alone more than pays for the extra gas-it's almost ten miles from here to the nearest store for milk.

I was raised in the suburbs of Washington DC. A couple blocks from home was my elementary school, and just past that what is now called a strip mall, with a grocery store, bakery, deli, and drug store. We would get a quarter (.25) and pig out on candy~ raisinets, chuckles, almond joys...comic books for a dime. Donuts every Sunday from the bakery...

My mother allowed me my freedom at a young age-I remember thinking, "I am old enough to go to the store alone?"

By age 11 we had a new dog . I was training basic commands and the best trick-how to jump over my leg or through a hula hoop...she was my ticket to real freedom. Not far past the school was an edge of Rock Creek Park-I found out years later it was actually private adjacent woodland. With the dog as company, I was allowed access by my mother to roam the trails with a command to "stay out of the creek". We pushed those limits, oftentimes coming home soaked from a rotten log bridge breaking at a bad moment...

But how polluted could it really be, when we were catching minnows and crawfish for the home aquarium? And pollywogs, or tadpoles, from the vernal pools...

I really had the best of both worlds growing up, all that wildness, raccoons raiding the trash barrels at night, squirrels knocking on the windows for their peanuts~we even raised an orphaned grey squirrel, hence my soft spot for them to this day.

We still had culture right at our fingertips-sure the store was a ten minute walk, but I roamed the halls of the Smithsonian`Natural History, and was there at the opening of the Air and Space-or was that the opening of the Hirshorn? Or maybe I am dating myself and it was just the opening of special exhibits...The Pandas Ling-ling and Hsing-Hsing at the National Zoo...the Kennedy Center...

Even Boss was a bit surprised when she told me she had named Ursula's Boy Yul, for Yul Brynner, and asked if I knew who that was? And I could say, "sure, I saw him at the Kennedy Center in a one man play, "The Odyssey" many years ago...my mother loved him."

And she replied, "My mother loved him too."