Ginger Snapped

I am currently obsessed with houses. Old houses. Giant houses. Houses with far too many bedrooms and bathrooms for my small family. Houses with porte cocheres and carriage houses and barns. Houses with fireplaces and tall windows and leaded glass. Houses with peaks and turrets and bay windows and balconies. Houses with libraries and butler's pantries and multiple staircases. I even found one with an elevator. I visit circaoldhouses.com more often than I should. I scroll through pictures when I should be organizing my tax documents. I look at house plans when I should be folding laundry. But laundry gets undone almost as soon as it's done, so why bother? If I lived in one of these houses, I would have a room of my own. In fact, I would have several rooms of my own. Probably one for each day of the week. One could be an office, one an art studio, one a dance/yoga studio, and one just for empty space where I could lie down on the floor and make snow angels, minus the snow. I...

Ginger and her sister In the beginning was the Word. In her beginnings, there was a book. Her mother told her she could read before she started kindergarten, and she started kindergarten at age four. Each week, she would walk with her grandmother and older sister the nine or ten city blocks to their local branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, a low brick building down a side street. There, she and her sister would settle in the children’s section, while their grandmother browsed through paperback mysteries and Regency romances. She remembers little of that library—windows, low shelves, Ezra Jack Keats’  A Snowy Day , and the front desk, where a stereotypically severe-looking librarian stamped their books with a heavy rubber stamp— ka-thunk! By the time she was in fifth grade, her mother was in graduate school studying to become an elementary school librarian. Long Saturday afternoons were spent in Lockwood Library at the university: Mom at the copier w...