I am by no means a sensitive new- age male, so occasionally I get hit with “How come you are always surrounded by strong women?” To me, it’s obvious. But there may be a second reason, or one that precedes rational analysis.
My very small, very odd, private Catholic grammar school had a copy of this statue in every room.
We won’t even talk about the nun who did welded metal sculpture and then went on to be a missionary in Dahomey, or the one who had charge of the altar boys and who climbed ropes in sandpits, in full habit, pre- Vatican II.
And for naturalists: shortly before Fran Hamerstrom, eagler, student of Aldo Leopold, and major character (when I lamented David Letterman’s condescenscion when she butchered a pigeon on his show, she tartly replied that all publicity was good), died, we found out that her childhood estate was my school– a square mile of woods surrounding a half- timbered mansion. Here is a pic, in her day.
The ballroom, to the right of the door, became the chapel, but kept the immense chandelier.
She probably didn’t entirely approve– she was rather anti-religious– but it must have amused her that we both collected specimens there in our childhoods.
I met Fran only once, and that was at a birding conference at Dupage. We were hanging with her before her talk (all in a circle around her feet as she smoked a quick one on the concrete steps outside; the word disciple comes to mind) and asked what she would be speaking about. “Don’t know til I get up there; don’t worry, though, you’ll learn something.” Indeed, we did. That was 1991 or 92.
In 1996 I called her in a panic when I was suddenly faced with raising and hacking 5 norhtern harrier chicks whose mother and two siblings had been killed by mandatory mowing. The beta female was also killed, and a third “floater” female hung around in the trees. The male was unhappy with us for taking them up bit natural history dictated such. To make a long story short, she told us what to do with a whistle, and to let the young run around. The hacking story went well and we saw them 3 weeks after the youngest was 56 days old in a field 4 miles from the hack site. We knew it was them because the Audubon Society told us that Harriers don’t nest in Indiana. Hmmm…