Ten Things I'm Not Going to Miss About Connecticut (Or The Protesting-Too-Much Lady)

1. It’s late May/early June, and it’s 95 degrees out, and the humidity level is hovering somewhere around 99%. You finally decide summer has arrived, and you risk heat stroke getting out all your summer clothes and dragging suitcases of winter clothes up to the sauna attic. Three days later, it’s dropped 40 degrees, and you have to risk frost bite going up into the freezer attic to retrieve a wool sweater.

2. The local NPR station runs out of a small college. If you drive five miles outside the town where that small college is located, you begin to lose reception. If you live 20 miles away, you have to balance the radio on your head and keep your right arm out to the side while never venturing from a particular tile in your kitchen floor in order to listen to it.

3. You can’t buy alcohol on Sundays or after 9:00 p.m. anywhere except a bar or restaurant, drastically reducing (of course) the chances that anyone on the road during these hours is driving under the influence.

4. Although you can buy beer in the grocery store, you can’t buy wine (because, you know, people are much less likely to get drunk if they drink a six pack of beer than if they drink a bottle of wine), and all the best and most-reasonably-priced places to buy wine are nowhere near any of the grocery stores anyone frequents. This means you can’t go to the grocery store, discover basil is on sale this week, decide pesto would be a great thing to have for dinner tonight, and pick up a nice bottle of wine to go with it. Or at least you can’t without having to spend so much on gas to get the wine, the money you’re saving on the basil isn’t worth it. Or you must keep a well-stocked wine cellar under the sorts of weather conditions mentioned in Thing #1.

5. If you’re female, blonde, and from the South, everyone assumes you’re

a. A complete ditz/moron
b. Inbred
c. a member of the KKK

and/or

d. all of the above

6. You’re looked at sideways if you refer to Connecticut’s “Thames River” (pronounced exactly as it’s spelled) as “The Thames” (pronounced the way it’s pronounced in every other civilized part of the world).

7. You can’t walk into a room full of people, say, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever had Lyme Disease” and expect no one will raise his or her hand. If you say, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been put on antibiotics as a preventative measure against Lyme Disease,” probably all hands will go up.

8. If the speed limit sign says 65, you’d better be prepared to drive 80, and don't be surprised if you look in your rearview mirror to find someone practically attached to your bumper, even at this speed.

9. You’d better know what street you are on at all times, because when you come to an intersection, although, if you’re lucky, there just may be a sign to tell you what the crossroad is, there will be no street sign to tell you the name of the road you’ve been traveling on for the last five miles.

10. These are the seasons you will enjoy if you happen to live here: winter (November 1 - March 30th), a little-warmer winter (April 1st - May 31st), road construction (June 1 – Aug. 31st), and road construction with very beautiful leaves (September 1 – October 31st).


A Bend in the River in a nutshell: what a wonderfully subtle, but for some reason, very gripping and powerful work about all the social and political changes in an African town at the bend in the river during the late 20th century.

Diddie, Dumps, and Tot in a nutshell: sometimes extremely difficult to read for someone with 21st-century sensibilities, but fascinating from a historical point of view and for its versions of African-American folktales. (I thought it would be banned everywhere and impossible to get, but not so.)