LAURA CANDLER

I tend to romanticize a lot of things in life. But last week really was romantic. I keep thinking it's a big dream, but a look at these photos, and I know that all the happiness was real. It still is. Here's what happened, in words and pictures.

Saturday, May 11.
We set our alarms for 4:30 a.m. (Trae in Chattanooga, I in Chapel Hill) Trae called me at 4:40, asking me if I was up. It had been two weeks since we last saw each other, on my birthday. Now, we were both driving separately to Cumberland, to spend a week at the old house.

We met at the dock with a pound of shrimp and time to spare. The first day we went to the beach house and read books. I wore my bathing suit the entire day, even in the 7-hour car ride.


Sunday.
We went for a walk on the old road south of Table Point, under the tall pines. There's some sort of old road bed there - a trench running from the backside shore inland. We walked along it until the palmettos got too thick for us to follow it. We picked lots of ticks off each other. But once we stepped out of the woods onto the marsh, the breeze was wonderful.
Sunday afternoon.
We went to the north end, my favorite part of the island. I think Trae knows this. Walking around, it was low tide and the sand bar stretched out very far, making the Christmas Creek outlet narrow. Trae asked me to marry him. I said yes. He gave me a beautiful ring. Then, I took some photos, but they were all out of focus. I think I was too happy to concentrate.


Out of focus birds. Everything on my memory card of that afternoon on the beach is fuzzy. haha!











On the way back from the beach, we saw a snake track across the dunes:

 

Anna behind the crankie, Elizabeth singing on the right.

My newest radio story is a non-narrated piece about the 25-year-old, old time musicians Elizabeth LaPrelle and Anna Roberts-Gevalt.  It aired on The Story with Dick Gordon on April 30, and on May 9 it aired on WMMT mountain community radio. How I heard about these women is a long story, and I've written it below. You can listen to the piece here:

Williams Island is on the right. Photo taken from a canoe in the (Tennessee) River.

Two or three summers ago there was a potluck dinner on Williams Island Farm. It began in the afternoon, a fire in the stone-circled ring with a dutch oven shoved in the coals, cooking some part of somebody's animal. There were a couple fiddles and a banjo. Later on, after whiskey, beer, moonshine, I'm sure, and a good meal, it was dark and the fire was still burning and sending up embers and I sang a ballad or two and there was more fiddle music. The night ended when we canoed back across the Tennessee River, Charlie Hunter's fiddle serenading us, the music bouncing off the rock face beneath the Baylor side. It was a lovely night, and that evening someone first told me about Elizabeth LaPrelle, the ballad singer.


I didn't know who she was then, but somehow I acquired her cd and I was blown away instantly. I won't describe her voice, you'll just have to listen. It's powerful. So when I heard she was coming to town a few months ago, a immediately got a ticket to see her. She was playing with Anna Roberts-Gevalt, whom I didn't know much about, but soon came to.

Anna's on the right. Elizabeth is in front on the left.

Anna is also a musician and a story-teller. It was Anna who first introduced Elizabeth to crankies, these hand-sewn strips of fabric embroidered and appliquéd with scenes from ballads. They use them when they sing sometimes. Anna plays fiddle, among other things, and she has also spent a great deal of time with other musicians, learning, recording, playing.

She put together a CD last year called the New Young Fogies, a remake of the original Young Fogies release in 1994. It's an album of young musicians playing old time music. Actually, that's how she met Elizabeth -- she wanted her to sing for the album. Also on that album is Brett Ratliff, who directs WMMT mountain community radio station in Whitesburg, Kentucky. (I visited WMMT for the first time last year with a friend whose grandmother lives nearby and whose sister was working at Appalshop then.) And a whole lot of other great young musicians like Joe Decosimo, who put out a nice album of fiddle music called Sequatchie Valley last year as well. Here's a photo of the road into Whitesburg:

It's a beautiful place. Anyway, when Anna and Elizabeth came to town (Durham, where I am now), I asked them if they'd like to come to WUNC for an interview, and that's how I made this radio story. We spoke for a good hour and a half, and they were nice enough to answer all my questions and it was even better hearing them sing and play music in the living room of somebody's house the night before. They showed their handmade crankies and told lots of stories. It was a magical evening. That's what this radio story is about. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for listening.

A whirlwind of a weekend, zipping down to Charleston and back to see happy cousins, eat lots of seafood, and hunt for the perfect benne wafer with my grandparents. I'd never been before. I also never knew that my grandparents had eaten beaver tail (and liked it). It came up during breakfast, when we saw alligator on the menu (which they've also eaten, but did not like). The last hour I was there, I strolled around the battery.





And then I saw this:

In 1911, the Tennessee Power Company dammed the Ocoee River east of Cleveland, TN, and created the state's first artificial lake.  TVA took over the company in 1939, and they've controlled the water level ever since. Nowadays, the river and lake are used mostly for recreation - the 1996 Olympic whitewater events were held there. (The whitewater center claims that it was the first Olympic whitewater event to be held on a natural river, but I'm not sure how natural it is if there's a dam controlling the flow.)  The day I happened to drive through the gorge, the water was extremely low - the dirt in the photo is the lakebed.

No water in Ocoee Lake, Sunday, March 9, 2013.

The average life expectancy of a dam is 50 years. The one that controls this lake is 101.

When I wanted to find stories as a kid, I walked into the woods. Not because people lived there, but because they had lived there, and evidence of it was everywhere. There were bottles half buried in the dirt, rusty moonshine stills beside streambeds, lumps of crumbling bricks beneath the leaves, patterned indentions in the ground, old wells. There were certain signs I came to recognize that indicated a house had stood there. English ivy and daffodils are pretty common. Last Sunday, I wandered around in one of Duke's forest tracts and found this old house site.

Highway 12 after Hurricane Irene. Outer Banks, North Carolina.   Credit: Western Carolina University

Adaptation. In the long run, adaptation is a means of survival. And you can find examples of it everywhere, from cave salamanders' blindness to the billions of bacteria in our own stomachs. Adaptations allow for evolution, and over millions of years, not by any conscious decision but through natural selection, adaptations prove to be very important. They allow species to survive.

But there are also behavioral adaptations. Like Poynter deciding to make its headlines lowercase. They are conscious decisions, made by looking at the world around you and realizing that it's different, and that as hard as it may be to accept it, you need to be different, too. It's as simple as learning from your mistakes. We adjust our behavior when we learn that the world acts a little bit differently than we thought it did. We grow up.


When I saw this picture of Highway 12 I was shocked. Not at the damage, but at the construction. I don't think it's wise to say this with any sort of "I told you so" attitude because weather patterns have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, but I think it's pretty obvious that it's not a good idea to build a house (or a road) on a beach anymore. Especially one with no dunes.

On the New Jersey coast, the two places that sustained significantly less damage from Hurricane Irene than their neighbors were behind a row of sand dunes. The dunes were made by people with bulldozers, but nevertheless, they did what all sand dunes do and protected the land behind them. The people without dunes took a beating. Now, people are getting pretty opinionated about dunes.

Humans are really good at making decisions about cutting out the parts of nature they don't want and, when that causes problems, trying to solve them by "battling" the natural forces that would have been mitigated by the things they eliminated in the first place.  It happened when a city called New Orleans was built below sea level, it happened when people decided they didn't like the natural course of the Atchafalaya River, it happens every time a kid builds a dam of sticks in a creek in their back yard, and it's happening right now on the Mississippi River, which in some places is 20 feet lower than it was last year. People are mad about it. And the funny part is - if there's anything funny about it - the Army Corps of Engineers (the same ones who built those sand dunes on the Jersey shore), is liable for it. John McPhee once put it this way in The Control of Nature: the Corps has been conceded the almighty role of God.  And we're paying them do it, and we get mad when they can't.

Before I go too far, I don't want to pretend like this is a simple problem with an easy solution. It's not. There are 30 million people living within a two hour drive of the Jersey shore. To say that they should all up and leave is ignorant of a lot of facts, including the importance of those 30 million people and the land they live on to our economy. Not to mention that they're people with lives and jobs, with homes and land full of history and memories, and people just don't uproot themselves that easily.

But I think that we can learn. And I think we should examine the way we're living and paying for it on a larger scale. Is there a way to live with the weather instead of resisting it? Instead of sea walls and "beach nourishment" (the official term for dumping sand on the shore), can we create a solution that acknowledges and allows for hurricanes? Erosion? Accretion? Can we adapt to a changing climate?

To end, I want to share before and after picture of another beach that weathered the storm. This one's off the coast of Georgia:

Cumberland Island, before the storm

Cumberland Island, after the storm.

Oh wait. That's the same picture.

Notice the dunes?  It's not "beach nourishment." That's just what happens when you let a beach be itself.

pine forest near my childhood home in Sharpsburg, Georgia

Recently, I started reading Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. It's about her life growing  up in a junk yard in south Georgia in the '60's and '70's. It's a perfect book to follow Praying for Sheetrock, which documents some striking events unfolding around the same time a couple towns away. And it makes me yearn for more great books about rural Georgia (suggestions?).

The best part about reading these two books for me is how much I've learned about the recent history of my home state. The history my parents were born into, the history my grandparents lived.

Throughout her book, Ray delves into the ecological history of her homeland and often describes what it used to look like - miles of uncut longleaf pine forest, the ground carpeted with wiregrass, crawling with gopher tortoises and the trees flecked with red-cockaded woodpeckers. This is one of my favorite passages:



I love that because she gets at the feeling we all yearn to have - to experience wonder and be humbled by it; to understand your place in the world, not just in present terms but in historical ones, too; to have a place you can call home and to connect with that on a deep, sustaining level. All of those are sentiments that any human longs for. In a sense, I think they are what we live for.


Have you read a book or had an experience that gave you a different understanding of your home? I'm curious to know of more books like this.

sunset over Kununnurra, Australia

Today, like every day, we wake up empty, scared.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument and start to play.
Let the beauty you love be what you do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Rumi


P.S. - Learn more about Kununurra here.

The Ladies Petroleum Club: L to R, Peggy Heth, Donna Peterson, Linda Alton, Sylvia McCauley, Steph Elinger (president), Wendy Bauste.

For 60 years, the Ladies Petroleum Club has been meeting once a month to share meals, play cards, host dances, and hang out.  They formed in 1952 as a social club for the wives of oilfield workers. Sylvia McCauley has been a member since 1965. I sat down with her a recent meeting and she shared her thoughts about what it has been like to be a member of the Ladies Petroleum Club for nearly 50 years.

Hear the story below:

An oil derrick and a rose.

Thurnell shook out his dreams like a quilt for the little boy to play on.

I love that line, about a father who harbors mountains of admiration and love for his young son.

It's from Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene. Have you read it?

It's good. It's good because it jumps back into that part of Georgia history where small, rural towns began to either grow up or die. When their all-white, all-male governments began to crack a little bit. When interstates were laid down. When old men still knit fishing nets by hand. When the African-American citizens of McIntosh county began to realize how bad they were getting duped. And when they decided to do something about it.

But mostly the book is good because it's just a crazy story. Because of racism, because of poverty, because of people's spirits and their persistence to do both good and bad. Because of a criminal who masqueraded as a sheriff and got away with it.  Because of people following through with their dreams. If you haven't read it, I recommend it.

They parked in starry fields in the small hours of the morning and captured fragments, falling from the night sky, of the Voice of America, on black-market radios.  Just this exotic and incredible and forbidden did the voices of the civil rights movement sound to the fishermen, gardeners, and maids of McIntosh County.

stick on a black sand beach in south Iceland

Proust had his madeleine. Others have shells, stones, fossils. I've been thinking more about the last post. The history of objects. What they evoke.  How we are transported by an object to some other time. Here's a thought from French photographer William Klein about the idea. His object was a sheet of photographic contacts:

"You look at a sheet of contacts, you look a little contact...and it brings back all the memories possible, you know? You remember whether it was raining or whether you were tired, whether you were full of beans or ready to walk another 5 miles.

A contact photo reminding him that he was full of beans. I love that.  There's a feeling associated with a photograph or a song or an object that evokes the exact senses you had at the time when its meaning was initially established. I remember the first time I ate a banana sandwich and liked it.  It was after a high school soccer game in LaGrange, Georgia. Now, banana sandwiches make me think of grass-stains and shin-guards.

Proust wrote a seven-volume novel about the idea of involuntary memory. I'd like to start writing more regularly about it. Maybe a weekly column. For today, here's an object that I found in my coat pocket this weekend and that I happened to photograph right before I picked up:


It's a seed of some kind. I found it and lots others like it scattered along the sidewalk in a neighborhood in Williston, North Dakota in October. I fell in love with its color and and texture - wrinkly, blueish-purple. When I felt it in my pocket last weekend, I thought of that windy day in Williston, and the big red coat I was wearing when I saw it.

Do you have any objects that remind you of a place? Have you read parts of Proust's novel? I think it's fascinating what sorts of random associations we make.


Parting Thoughts:  A beautiful folk song by a Bulgarian choir that I can't stop listening to and a poem by Robert Wrigley about horses and fossils and time called "After a Rainstorm."

Kiruna, Sweden

I've done a lot of moving the in the past five years. Some of my recent homes include: a 7th floor apartment in Paris, where I'd climb onto the roof with friends and enjoy a bottle of wine while gazing upon a sea of rooftops; a tall blue house on Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine, just a half a block from the Atlantic Ocean; an apartment in St. Elmo, a neighborhood in Chattanooga at the base of Lookout Mountain, where the Confederate troops were defeated by the Union army in the fall of 1863; a basement room in Iceland off Laugavegur, Reykjavík's long main street - I remember going to sleep at midnight there and it still being sunny outside due to the bright Arctic summer.

Next week, I'm adding another place to my list: Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  I'll be living there for the next few months to take a position with WUNC. I'm excited to have a whole new town to discover and call my own, but for a lot of reasons it's also bittersweet. The place I live in now, an old white house in a diverse Chattanooga neighborhood, will be another home I've lived in and left behind with a whole host of great memories.

One thing that I like to do when I'm living in a place for a while is find some sort of token - take an object, however large or small, and make a memory out of it to keep with me. When I lived briefly in Norway in 2010, I visited some outer islands in the middle of winter and found a small frozen shell to take back. In Scotland, I picked up a smooth pebble from a beach on the west coast. To remind me of Sweden, I have a tiny pair of earrings:


I lived in Sweden for two months in December 2009-February 2010 (to see this).  Because it was my first Christmas away from my family, and I hadn't lived there long enough to know anyone, I decided I would buy myself one Christmas gift, my only gift that year. I wandered through the town of Kiruna, way up above the Arctic Circle in Lapland, peeking in shops and stores. In mid-December there, the sun sets for about three weeks, so the town was dark and covered in snow drifts and ice. I remember finding a little Swedish gift shop and spied these earrings under a case. They were made in the Saami tradition, carved from a reindeer antler and birch wood.  I bought them and kept them with me the rest of the year.

Kiruna at night, December 2009

My Christmas that year ended up being a nice one.  A scientist friend invited me to go cross-country skiing with her family for the day, and to share dinner with them afterwards. And the town was just beautiful.  Kiruna has a gorgeous old Swedish church that was decorated for the season, and I got a taste of Swedish holiday food that I never would have been able to experience if I hadn't been there for Christmas - things like blueberry soup, smoked eel, reindeer meat, lingonberry jam, and my personal favorite, Janssons frestelse, which is basically a potato casserole with anchovies and lots of cream. Oh, and lots of snaps and glögg (mulled wine).  It was a lonely time, but a beautiful one, and I'm glad to have a little token to remember it by.


Do you have a certain object that reminds you of a particular place or time in your life?  I'd love to hear!

Mom's turkey feather wreath

Grandad calls this rose bush outside his house the "Fried Egg Bush."

Shooting mistletoe with grandad.

Inspecting a log full of oyster mushrooms beside the creek. They were too soggy to eat this time.

Merry Christmas!

Oriental bittersweet my brother gathered for me in Sewanee, TN.

  I love bringing the outside inside. Maybe it's because I grew up in the country, maybe it's because my mom is an expert at it, or maybe I just find it a bit more serene to have green things around. Throughout the year there are always flowers or grasses or branches sticking out of some old bottle on a tabletop or windowpane in this house. So Christmas, for me, is the ultimate excuse to have even more of it around. Here are some of the things that I've been making and the greenery that inspires it.



I stopped at a gas station in Sharpsburg and there were people selling Christmas trees in a parking lot next door. I asked them if I could take their left over clippings to decorate with and they said yes. I made this wreath from those clippings and from holly tree branches from my parent's house.

I've never had my own Christmas tree before, but since it's the first Christmas I'm sharing a house, this year feels a little more special than the last few. Trae and I cut a tiny cedar tree at his parents' home in Jasper, TN. While we were driving around, I spotted a shortleaf pine, so we gathered some cones. I made this little star from those. (interesting fact: the scientific name for shortleaf pines is Pinus echinata, which comes from the Greek "echinos," meaning prickly, hedgehog.)

I think he did a good job!  The only thing we're missing now is some mistletoe.

Are there any holiday decorations that you've put up this year? I'd love to hear about them!

Sometimes we come to a place to think and when we arrive we cannot.  All there is to do is watch - wait, watch, and be silent.

I came to see the sun rise from the marsh.  Tide is low.  Best time of day to fish. The raccoon knows  - emerging from a canyon in the Spartina, it waddles noisily out to the edge of Christmas Creek.  As it approaches the water's lip, its spindly joints plunge into dark mud with deep sucking sounds, like a congested frog trying to croak.  With muddy paws it combs the shallows for nibblins, finds nothing, and decides to swim across the creek to an oyster bed.


Down the creek, the egrets have returned, standing in the shallows as still as powdered mimes rooted within the current of a crowd, stepping only at the glint of profit.  A kingfisher screeches and swings low over the standing birds.  One flies off, two others remain.  Snowy egrets.  It is late November.  A couple of sandpipers with beaks like pencils and calls like poorly imitated automatic weapons fly abreast over the Spartina and land in the mud beside an egret and now, the raccoon.

The tide has turned.  Christmas Creek is rising.  The oysterbed goes under.  The trickle of an inlet through the grass widens -- a finger's width, hand's width, a thigh's.  A red heron joins us for a few minutes, then departs, tracing the contour of the creek out to sea.  Clouds in the east finally flush peachy before the sun's grand entrance.



Overhead, two woodstorks pass by, sounding a faint wheeze with each wing beat.  They turn inland to the freshwater pond and light in a live oak.  The raccoon I can no longer hear, the last egret flew to shallower shoals, and the blinding rim of the sun rises behind an enormous live oak silhouetted on the edge of the marsh, east.  Another woodstork passes overhead, this one scintillating white in the blaze of the early sun.  In the distance to the west, the marsh burns gold and the gold is growing, spreading eastward in a slow and steady advance, dissolving shadow, declaring it wholly and unequivocally, day.

I love hanging out with my family. I know I'm a little biased, but I think they're some of the best folks around. Each Thanksgiving, after spending a week on Cumberland Island with all 28 of them, I come away with enough memories to last me another year. This year, notable ones included digging for clams and oysters off Burbank Point,

Thanks to my cousin Alden for this picture!

playing music with the family around a fire one evening, roasting fresh oysters, coming upon a bald eagle walking on the beach, spending time with the residents from the south end of the island (and making more music with them), hiking among huge twisted live oaks and scratchy palmettos and mushy sand dunes, and hanging out with the newest member of the family, a wide-eyed two-month old boy.

(and thanks to Trae for this one)

I wish I could show you photos of everyone and everything, but I'll just post some highlights here.

Trae at the marsh at dusk (when the Spartina turns gold)

Wild things often end up in our kitchen, thanks to Richard and Carroll, who like to forage for tasty food

my brother Richard on banjo

my grandparents with my sister Callan and Bentley

Dad adding oil to the plane before take off

Stripping a sparkleberry tree to make a walking stick

A burst of healthy Red Bay trees, unusual since most of them are dying from a fungus called Laurel wilt.

and my family, after digging for clams and mussels

Thanks family for another great year!

p.s. - as I write this post, there are Sandhill Cranes flying over Chattanooga! I can hear their trilly voices from inside the house.

It's not fig season anymore, but this is what the fig trees look like right now. After the first frost, they drop most of their leaves and remain dormant until spring. These trees are on Crabtree Farms, a nonprofit educational farm in Chattanooga.  There's still a bit of green fruit on the tops of some branches. Pretty, huh?







Any unusual Thanksgiving traditions in your family?

Okay, cloud nerds, it's been a while since I've talked about the great gig in the sky, but I absolutely had to show you this. I was driving through the Atlanta suburbs Wednesday afternoon when I noticed that the sky had this eerie, underwater look to it. I pulled off and took a few photos from a hill beside a parking lot. And got really excited.





The reason I was so excited about this cloud is not only because I think it looks strange and beautiful, but also because it is the center of some hubbub in the world of cloud watchers. Before a few years ago, this cloud did not have a name. But in 2009, the Cloud Appreciation Society started getting enough pictures of this unusual cloud that they decided it needed a name, Undulus asperatus (don't you love how clouds are classified by a Linnean system, just like living things?). Asperatus means agitated, and undulus means waves. Pretty accurate, no?

In the great cloud name game, people universally recognize the World Meteorological Organization as the entity with the power to create new cloud classifications. They publish the International Cloud Atlas, basically a field guide for the sky. (Completely unrelated: There is a novel by David Mitchell called Cloud Atlas that was just made into a movie.) The newest cloud in their collection is Cirrus intortus, added in 1951, and the latest edition of the International Cloud Atlas was published in 1975.

As far as why asperatus forms, it is believed that the cloud results from convective storm activity. The wavy underside is the result of warm and cold air meeting at at the boundary of the lower and middle atmospheres (I learned that here.) The analogy often used is oil and vinegar - like the two layers of atmosphere, they don't really mix, and when you shake them up a little with convective activity (moisture, lift, and instability), the result looks something like this:


So, the WMO is under some pressure to add Undulus asperatus (or Undulatus asperatus) to its big book. Personally, I think it would be great. There's a gallery full of asperatus cloud photos, and it just keeps growing. Asperatus even made it on the radio.

What do you think? Should it be a new cloud classification? Have you ever seen Undulus asperatus?


Also:
--A picture of Gavin Pretor-Pinney (founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society) at the Royal Meteorological Society. I love this picture because it's exactly what you would imagine a British society devoted to weather to look like - a bunch of men (and one woman) in ties sitting in a room full of gold-framed oil portraits, staring at a table full of cloud pictures.
--The Cloud Appreciation Society's Asperatus page -  two stunning images of Asperatus.
--Read all about the classification of clouds here!

 It wasn't a special day. In fact, I don't even remember it. According to a rough calculation, it probably happened around September 23rd. On that day, I passed the mean age of a U.S. woman at the time of her first birth.





As a non-married 25-year-old woman in a committed relationship, it's something that wanders across my mind from time to time. Kids. Whether or not to have them, when to have them, how and where.  It's not a consuming thought, and it's not even something my partner and I have discussed with each other yet, although we hint at it from time to time. But it's there, on the back of my mind. And a few things happend this year that have me thinking about this more than I have in the past:

1. Two people I know gave birth to their first child this year: a close friend in Tennessee had a boy in February, and my cousin gave birth about a month ago to the first of a new Candler generation. In my family, that was a big deal. Both of these ladies were 28 or 29.

2. The second thing that put this on my map was the article by Anne-Marie Slaughter that ran in The Atlantic this summer, entitled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." I was traveling back from Canada and I picked it up in the airport for some plane reading, and wow. In the piece, she discusses why she left her high-level position in the State Department to be with her two adolescent boys, and how her experience reflects the lack of equal opportunities for mothers (and why it's different for fathers) in the professional world. She cites things that she'd like to see change in the workplace in order to iron out some of the difficulties for working mothers and also for people caring for aging parents.


More than her personal experiences in the workplace, what struck me about her article was what she had to say about timing your kids. Deciding whether or not to raise children is a huge event, up there with the biggest decisions you'll ever make. The fact that (some form of) birth control is fairly easy to obtain, along with the knowledge we now have of men's and women's reproductive health as it relates to age makes timing a big factor. And for women with less flexible jobs or a meager maternity leave, waiting to establish some level of professional satisfaction before even trying to have kids is common.  Recently, I spoke to a man who had always planned on starting a family with his wife, but they waited too long for him to achieve financial stability, and by the time he did, it was too late.

Which makes me think: are we making something extremely complicated out of something that's actually pretty simple? Yes, there's a lot to think about and it's a huge decision. But people have been reproducing literally forever, and you know what? I don't think it has ever been this easy. We have a lot of knowledge now and a lot of control over the decision now, and there might be some pretty hairy or uncertain factors, but at some point, you just have to say: yes. Or no. And stick with that. I mean, the reason we're all here is because our parents at some point decided to (or accidentally did) have us. It's not a new situation. If we all went through life trying to be extremely risk-averse, things would get pretty boring.*

3. And lastly, I just discovered this blog on the Scientific American website called Context and Variation written by Dr. Kate Clancy. In a word, it's great. She's a passionate, intelligent, and pleasantly articulate scientist dissecting popular discussions (and books) that deal with, in her words, ladybusiness. I want to go back and read every one of her articles, she's that good. That's how I learned that the mean age of a US woman having her first child is 25.4. Which made me think - hey, I'm almost exactly that age.



So why write about it? Well, I think it's an interesting discussion, and I'm intrigued by the reasons people have for making this huge decision. It's something we all deal with, at some point or another. What are your thoughts on having or not having kids? Are/were these things considerations for you? Did you read Anne-Marie Slaughter's article?





*A side note rant: I think this is important to think about, but sometimes I find this entire discussion a bit overwhelming. Women's bodies are so politicized - whether through maternity leave or abortion, as we witnessed in certain comments leading up to the election. It's one of those issues that makes me want to live 200 years in the future, when people will probably laugh at things like inequality in the workplace, women having to decide between being a mother and being a professional, and the right of a woman to exercise control over her reproductive decisions.