“I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.” ~ Khalil Gibran. My Auntie Elsie remained unmarried until she died. She was the eldest of six children, and we don’t know if it was because she stayed home to take […]

“For when the One Great Scorer comes To mark against your name, He writes – not that you won or lost – But how you played the Game.”~Grantland Rice. I grew up the youngest of five children, until we adopted an older sister, so then we were six.  And there were always miscellaneous others in […]

“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”~George Carlin.  I have no definitive memory of when I saw my first full moon.  Spending my first seven years mostly in a city was one factor.  Even when we went on vacation to the less light polluted seaside, I have no recollection of […]

“A woman is like a tea bag, you can’t tell how strong she is till you put her in hot water.”~Eleanor Roosevelt.  As a child, I hated the color pink.  I don’t know how early this started, but I detested it.  There was a saying: ‘Pink to make the boys wink’.  I detested that too, […]

“Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing, but of reflection.”~Winston Churchill.  December has always been my favorite month of the year.  Not only because of Christmas, but because it is my birth month.  So of course I am prejudiced.  Even though I have lived in warm zones for most of my life, I always […]

“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”~Margaret Mead.  Many years ago, when I was a child in England, I somehow got drawn into a small playground game.  This older girl was pulling the caps off the younger boys’ heads and throwing them up in the air.  I have no idea how […]

“Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.”~Gail Sheehy. In 2006, on a trip to the beautiful YS Falls in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, I was invited to take a chance, to take a leap of faith, to branch out.  Zip-lining.  I was tempted but.  Perhaps it was too much money (a friend offered to […]

“Just living is not enough…one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”~Hans Christian Andersen.   My father was chaplain and teacher of Bible Knowledge at a high school in the heart of Jamaica.  Since the school was founded under the ‘auspices’ of a Christian School, the subject was not Religious Knowledge.  There was no […]

“In the end we will remember, not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”~ Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a card game we used to play when I was young; it was a simple game of pairing cards.  But the deck was spread out (face down) on a table, and […]

“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.”~Mikhail Gorbachev.  One of the problems with growing up as a preacher’s child (parson pickney, in Jamaican terms) is the unrealistic expectation that somehow you will behave better than the average child.  My mother discovered that I had ‘unfriended’ […]