Some road leading somewhere

Deb Lewis wrote:

"Our town is small and we've been to the museums here more than once but we still find new things to do here. A new store opened so we checked it out and talked to the owner. The radio station moved from the residence of the owners to a building downtown and we took a tour. The mom-in-law of my employer got a bunch of fancy chickens and we drove out to see them. She showed Dylan a coffee table book about chickens. She showed us her little sun room where she grows orchids.

"There's always something to do, someone to talk to, some road leading somewhere."



SandraDodd.com/strew/how
photo by Sandra Dodd of a road splitting in Owslebury; the left goes to Longfields
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Nuttiness is relative

Deb Lewis, writing in 2006, referring to 1999:


Spending time with Dylan made it hard for people to make an argument that he was missing something by not going to school. He was bright and articulate and lively. "But when he gets older," they started saying, "he'll need to go to school for the important subjects."

About this time some homeschooling kids were winning spelling bees and geography bees. Some public school kids were shooting up their classrooms. Suddenly, keeping a kid out of school didn't seem as nutty as it had a few years before.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/deblewis/years
photo by Sandra Dodd
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A Monstrous Imagination

Deb Lewis once wrote, of her son Dylan:

Dylan's imagination took off when he saw his first monster movie. Monsters! Guys in monster suits. There are monster suits?! Model trains, model railroads, model cities, model tanks, model soldiers. Giant moths. Flying turtles. When he was four he'd say to me "Mom, do you want to watch Gammera? Flying turtles! You don't see that every day!" And, by golly, you don't.

And when he saw the animation of Ray Harryhausen the parade of clay monsters through our house was jaw-dropping genius.

And when he played his first Playstation game his mind was going so fast he didn't have time to change out of his pj's. How do you kill the Dragon? How can you get past the troll on the bridge? How do you defeat the Cyclops? Could you really fling a cow in a trebuchet? Anyone who thinks these things don't inspire and require imagination is too disinterested or unimaginative to think about it much.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/imagination
photo by Sandra Dodd
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