Back in the 60s, when I was about 12 or 13, I asked for a microscope! I totally love looking through them. Dad got me this one, and there have been few things I have treasured more in my life. I got a slide preparation kit, and a dissection kit, and some prepared slides also. To make my own slide I took, say, a bit of onion skin and laid it on the slide. Then there were the slide covers, impossibly thin pieces of glass to lay over the top (and glue on if I wanted it permanently.) I don’t remember dissecting anything at home, though I imagine I did bugs and stuff. I know in biology classes, both high school and college, there were cats (mine had kittens! aaahhhhhh!) and a frog in college. The frog, oh my. Somehow we kept it’s heart beating while we dissected it. Vivid memory. How to forever mentally scar freshmen in one class! yikes! But there was little I enjoyed more than looking in the microscopes in school (stronger magnification than mine) and seeing all the animals swimming around in a drop of water. Loved it.

I remember one sun drenched day at the beach. It had been years since I had been. The very first thing I did was scoop  water up in my hands and let it slip back into the ocean and think, “this is life”.

I think back, and realize both Dad and myself were a bit before our time. A girl, wanting a microscope instead of, say, a dress or shoes? And he got it for me. And Mom encouraged all this too. Once, I had brought part of a science project home. I spilled some hydrochloric acid on the living room carpet and she was very proud of that hole in her carpet! She was always telling company how it got there. When I had children, one of the things I looked most forward to was sharing my love of science with them. Warren and Asher love science too, and I am grateful. Warren has done something I am crazy jealous of, he has seen mitochondria. But, I got to look through a cold microscope once at Baylor (can’t remember what it was called now, but it was awesome to have him show it to me!) He had prepared his own images of a virus. wow

Here are pics of my microscope and slides and kits: