I’ve never really been scared of things that go bump in the night. Sure, when I was little, I had the occasional paranoid conviction that something was lurking just outside my bedroom window or under my bed or in my closet. But somewhere along the way, life just ripped that fear out of me. It’s actually the scariest things that ever happened to me that have made me primarily convinced…
For me, nothing evokes magical childhood summers like the smell of an old house, especially that of a smoker. My sister and I spent summers at our grandparents’ place. Each year, she and I would board a propeller plane without parents and fly an hour to Hamilton, Ontario, where our grandfather waited in the tiny airport, smoking homemade unfiltered cigarettes and beaming. These summers were delicious with danger. Every day began at the…
Adulthood has come more slowly to me than I believe it does to most. I was the girl who was absolutely flummoxed when college was ending and everyone was going off to their grown-up careers with job titles I couldn’t even understand (and still can’t — am I the only one who couldn’t tell you what the hell, say, a systems analyst does?). I didn’t understand how and when everyone…
