Autumn

The juniors want to do “walking TAPS.” This sounds ominous, but isn’t: TAPS is total and perfect silence, our ritual for beginning class. I didn’t invent it, I took it, and the way I do it, I put on a video with some soothing image and relatively soothing music (though sometimes if it’s a bit […]

Jungle

We breathed the thick air of the jungle of Omaha, the day after Grandma’s funeral. There were fuzzy gibbons, one of them with a baby hooked to her, and we looked hard at the two of them, my mother, my sisters, me, us four. We walked through the butterfly house, watching our feet to not […]

Where I’m From

*Note: this writing reflects nothing on actual, true-life Schurmans, and their actual “issues,” as I solely lay claim to said “issues,” and all the other Schurmans are wonderful people who have generously tolerated both my serious and my flippant remarks for 33 years. All genealogical information is based on my sloppy and cursory clicking through Ancestry.com. The Schurmans certainly did not come over on the Mayflower– they came from Amsterdam some time later. It is true that many Schurmans remain in Canada, while I am descended from those who returned to America, obviously because they realized how awesome the colonies turned out to be, or (more likely) because they were not laid back enough to make it as Canadians.

The Whistle

I’m going to take a couple of risks here: ranting about how other people should raise their children (bearing in mind that I have no children, to make it even juicier), and writing about a rerun on television. Today Oprah’s show reran a feature on a 7-year-old girl who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. This […]