Excitement abounds. The little one is sugared up from a Valentine’s Day party at her preschool. That same preschool announced it would close one hour early, before a snowflake even fell. And when it did fall in its cute little Southern snowfallish way, the little one couldn’t help but notice that there was snow on trees, on cars, in the street, on leaves and so forth.
We won’t get the three feet of snow that my sister is still digging out of in the metropolitan Washington area. But we will get more than the laughable dusting we got almost a month ago. What’s more, we’ll get wet, packable stuff that’s good for snowballs and maybe even a snowman too.
A ridiculously petite snowman…but a snowman nonetheless.
Mom is probably being accused of leaving games early in this picture.
Long before my parents divorced, my mother spent a good number of years telling my father that she didn’t want anyone to know he was her husband. This happened in the early 1970s. Back then, Dad would leave our home in Baton Rouge on Sunday mornings in various states of disrepair from LSU games the night before so he could attend Saints games in New Orleans. My mother thought he was insane (which was partly true) because she couldn’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily get up and invest several hours of one’s time in something that was so bad.
In Mom’s defense, she said she tried to hang in there for about the first six or so years. And by the first six or so years, she meant the first years of the Saints franchise, not of her marriage. She hung in there for 12 years of that. But all during this past season, Mom remembered those early days when she could still bear to watch, even during the 1970 halftime show when a guy shot off his fingers during a re-enactment of the Battle of New Orleans. [click to continue…]
Though the details are hazy, I remember seeing the dolphin shows at Marine Life Oceanarium in Mississippi when I was a little girl. I loved dolphins (still do) and remember how my father walked me out to the holding pens where trainers kept the sleek, smiley-faced mammals when they weren’t performing. I don’t remember what my father told me when we watched the dolphins swim around and around in these pens. I do remember that I was happy that I could be so close to something I loved.
Yet I still recognized the size difference between the ocean where these dolphins usually swam and the rusty pen that was now their home. But as small as I was back then, my takeaway was [click to continue…]
Paige Bowers writes features and personality profiles for the nation's top media outlets. She lives in the Atlanta area with her husband, toddler daughter and an aggressively affectionate beagle.
