8 Things You Are Unlikely to Know about Me Even if You are My Friend

1. I’m a shawl girl. I’m partial to wool but I also wear other materials! My fanciest ones are the ones that my mother made me. This is my favorite, which I currently don every day.  Thanks Mom.
2. I wear a nightgown. Though I like to have my shoulders covered because they get cold, oddly enough I still haven’t found the perfect short-sleeved nightgown. It has to have the right amount of cute and comfort. Still looking.
3. I took gun safety class as a teenager. I was one of two girls in the class.

4. I also went duck hunting with my father and brother once. The experience never repeated itself mostly because of the ungodly hour you have to rouse (3am), followed by the great amount of sitting quietly in the cold you have to do. While out there that day I did shoot at one duck. Though the experience was but once, the memory has lived on in all of our minds because it made my brother bark with laughter. Apparently the bird I shot at was so far away that there was absolutely no way the bullet would have reached it. Keeping up the job of all good brother’s—my brother never let me forget my error.  

5.  I spent the last year of my 20’s living in an ashram in the Catskills where I chanted and meditated every day. I was the writer on staff. That same year, at that same time, Elizabeth Gilbert was half way across the world at the mother ashram in India (of the same tradition) having the experiences that would become PRAY of her Eat, Pray, Love book. Though I don’t know Elizabeth, I know all the teachers whom she references in her book, and I loved every minute of reading that section.

6. Though I’ve likely been doing this my whole life, it took having a husband for me to realize that I spill almost everything I touch in the kitchen. Though I am now aware of it, I am unable to change this. (I tell you, it’s not on purpose!) Sometimes I feel ashamed of this. Other times I apply the phrase that my mother coined on the subject: I smile and say, “It just comes naturally.”

7. I once spent a whole spring break alone reading Gone with the Wind in the air-conditioned home of my aunt and uncle who were living in Florida. I had no wheels, so I couldn’t get to the beach. Still, I remember the experience fondly and still feel great satisfaction over it.

8.When I lived in Colorado I sometimes cried over my extreme distance from the ocean. Now I live on an island and am surrounded by the water that I love—so that’s a happy ending.