sonounavolpe

When I was a kid (about eight or so, I imagine), I stepped on one of these guys while out at the beach. The beach was all sand bars (commonly referred to as sand flats), and sand bars in tropical waters is where you’ll find a nurse shark.

Despite the ability of the Nurse Shark (not to be confused with the Grey Nurse Shark, which is TOTALLY different) to grow to 13-14 feet, the one that I stepped on way back when was just a baby, which probably explains why he darted away, rather than trying to eat me.

The nurse shark (even the bigger ones) has a very small mouth, and it manages to capture and consume its prey by sucking on it until the skin and meat is pulled off the bones and into the shark’s mouth. This is, in fact, where the shark gets its name, which certainly makes ME reevaluate the relationships that I have with nurses that I know…

I was an only child growing up, and despite having countless cousins and tonnes of kids in the area my own age, I remember telling my mother when I was very, very young that I would never get married and that I would be a writer when I grew up. Of course, I would later talk about having children, and I could never really figure out why a husband had to enter into that… and I still don’t, but we know the reason for that now.

I played games by myself, built cities and nations in my room (where the Lego Kingdom was near the Tinkertoy Kingdom, where people were clearly taller, and across the room from the Lincoln Log Kingdom, where there were mountains and snow and it was rural but obviously quite wealthy because they all had such nice homes), wrote novels in gym class. Sure, I had friends, but I had entire kingdoms in my mind, and that, for me, is what independence is (and always has been) about.

Perhaps I’m too independent; I’m very quick to throw out the accusation that people don’t know me at all, but how could anyone hope to glean the dimensions of another person’s mental landscape? For some, I suppose, it’s a matter of imagination, but I live there, among the tornado chasers and the outdated dragoons. Now I travel alone, and I write alone, but only because it offers me more things to write about, new stories, new ideas, new characters.

Even from the beginning, I believed in doing everything you could by yourself.

this is on hold for a bit, as I’m about to leave the country, but when I get back, I’ll make it a priority.

These are the ones I’m missing:

Alaska
Colorado
Connecticut
Indiana
Maine
Massachusetts
Minnesota
New Hampshire
North Dakota
Ohio
Rhode Island
South Dakota
Vermont