Clean Eyes

A couple of months ago, there was this ten year challenge going around on various social media, mostly Instagram and Facebook.  I remember looking through photos (and yes, I did post one just for fun) and thinking to myself that I literally look the exact same.  My hair was more or less the same length, color, and I was more or less happy to the same extent, at least upon first glance at the image.  But if you dug beneath the surface, Marie of 2009 and Marie of 2019 are very different.

Travels from the Time Vault: London

I don’t remember the first time I traveled to London, mostly because I was only an infant when my parents first took me.  My father used to travel a lot with his business, so we went there frequently, as well as other places in Europe.  We continued to go there when I was younger, until our family grew a little bit more and things busied up enough where we didn’t have the time.  But we had our fair share of family adventures, most of the time accompanied by our favorite cab driver, Charles.  It wasn’t until I was eleven that I ventured there on my own with a student group.

The Not-So-Snow Day in September

It was a Tuesday morning in September.  Third grade had just started barely two weeks earlier and I was getting used to my new teacher, Mrs. Crowe.  She had long red curls and big brown eyes. When she talked, any topic she brought up was bright and cheery. She made math sound like the happiest thing in the world.  Walking around as we worked on our workbooks, enthusing about how “math was the key to everything” and telling us if “we could multiply and divide, you could do anything” in that happy, cheery voice of hers.  Some days, I believed what she said to be true.