#one detail I remember is a ghost boy with his ghost turtle—named Myrtle

[cultivating-wildflowers]

3 and 18 for the ask game, please?

3. If you could learn a new skill, what would it be?

Rolling my R’s. Really, any of the little vocal tricks that help with learning new languages, but especially that one. I tried learning Danish several years ago and discovered I would need to trill the R’s for that and was so irritated that I gave up.

I’ve tried all the tricks. Nothing works. I’m doomed to sound like a moron whenever I try to say “dog” in Spanish.

18. Tell us about an early childhood memory.

My introduction to the concept of “genes”, as in “a trait passed down from parent to offspring”, came from Animal Planet.

We spent a lot of time at my maternal grandparents’ house when I was little, and the TV was always on for background noise while we played and talked and helped Grandma with busywork. If it wasn’t Tour de France season and Grandma hadn’t decided to turn on a weird direct-to-tv movie, Animal Planet was the go-to channel. I learned a lot from Animal Planet. (Especially Emergency Vet. Some of those images…they haunt me.) At one point there were a couple of people talking off-screen while we got to watch a mama dog with her new litter of puppies. Most of the puppies were the same golden color as the mother, but a few were chocolate or black. One of the people mentioned the puppies’ dad’s “jeans” and I spent way too long being absolutely baffled by how a dog’s denim pants had any impact on puppies before I must have asked someone for clarification.

It’s a testament to the weird workings of a kid’s brain that the hang-up was not over the dog wearing pants in the first place. That seemed perfectly reasonable.