I was raised on a steady diet of platitudes. The early bird gets the worm. Every cloud has a silver lining. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Like so many things I told my children, phrases like these become meaningless – perhaps because they are said so often.

It’s been three years since I took a careless step into a puddle of water at an athletic event and tore my hamstring muscles.

I remember slowly doing something like the splits and feeling a tearing motion so visceral that I could almost visualize what was happening under the skin.

Archeologists can learn a lot about our ancestors by going through their garbage.

Those treasure troves, called midden piles, can tell us what people ate, what kind of dishware they used, even what they excreted, which is a fancy way of saying poop.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of COVID changing our lives in almost every way possible, we could focus on the negative.

We have all lost something in the last 12 months. Some have lost people they loved, including one of their parents.

Between my current job and my former one, I have sat within a few feet of a police scanner for almost 25 years. 

It has been my background music, until a call comes in that requires our attention. Every emergency call is important, but from a news perspective, many are commonplace.

Growing up in what was then a small town in Illinois, I had a dog and a pony, both of which routinely ran away.

I also had a cat who ran to us, transforming herself from an unwanted stray to a much-loved house guest.

I’m not sure how I survived growing up in Illinois, why I thought it was fun to strap on shoes with blades on them and stumble across a frozen river.

I waited for the bus in sub-freezing temperatures and considered it normal to don layers of clothing so thick I couldn’t press my arms down to my sides. It took 10 minutes to get dressed to step out the front door and almost that long to take it all off again.

In the four months since I’ve been editor of the Navarre Press, Santa Rosa County and I have been courting each other. As a 20-plus year resident of Okaloosa and an occasional visitor to Santa Rosa, we were more like good acquaintances than close friends.

You never know what you’ll find during a walk on the beach.

Sand dollars, seashells, driftwood or debris. You might spot a sea turtle trolling along parallel to shore or have to dodge a shore fisherman’s thin shimmering line. You might see crabs or jellyfish or baitfish along with surfers, swimmers and paddleboarders.

They say that smells carry you back to wherever you were when that scent imprinted on you.

For me, it’s music.