3 Ring Binder

Gearing up for my annual Girls Weekend, I was at the store today to stock up on a few necessary grocery items. (Okay. Let's face it - it was for garnishes for my fantabulous Girls Weekend drinks.) Seeing no standard limes, I picked up a bag of ugly looking tiny Key limes and inspected them. Suddenly, up from my hands wafted this most wondrous smell!  It was them! They had the most splendidly sweet and citrusy subtle scent of a sultry summer soirée.  I wanted to bathe in them! (It's happened often enough that you could say this is my standard reaction when I really like the smell of something.) Then I spied the big, uniformly green, regular limes for much less in the next aisle.  I wondered aloud if I should put back the more expensive bag of little discolored ones in favor of the pretty standard limes. They were going to be for decorative touches after all. My daughter chimed in and said, "But did you smell these limes?" holding up the bag of Key limes. She k...

Since the time she learned her alphabet, my youngest daughter has insisted that she sees the letters of the alphabet, as well as numbers and words, as colors.  That’s nice, dear , was my typical response the first thirty times. Her insistence about the sensation was matched only by her consistency about which colors represented which letters. Still, I figured it was some kind of early memory that mapped these letters and numbers to these colors.  Then I heard about synesthesia . I’m not sure where or when I first heard of it, but I was attracted to the name because it seemed the root was the pretty esthete and syn always brings things together nicely. Turns out, the root is aisthesis , which means perception, and synesthesia is a neurological condition in which signals cross-over different parts of brain to make essentially joined perception s of the sensory data. It’s fascinating! While studies so far do not rule out the impact of strong early memory mapping, it is thought...

First, there are two things you should know about me: 1) When I get excited my voice jumps up by two or three octaves, and 2) Sometimes, when I laugh with abandon , what I abandon is the integration of my proprioceptors along with sensory awareness of my immediate surroundings. This lack of integration often leads to me hitting my head on whatever is behind, beside, or sometimes, even in front of me. Back to the shoes. Today, when my daughter brought in the mail, a packaged Dansko shoebox was among the bills and catalogs. It was addressed to my husband, but this in no way stopped me from examining the box.   My love for my red patent leather Dansko clogs is well known, so when I saw the label claiming that these were women’s shoes, my excitement was only partially diminished by the fact that they were also purported to be one size too big for me and brown . Thinking it was odd for him to buy me shoes, let alone brown shoes and in the wrong size, I called him to ask. “Did you buy ...