Author: Sarah Barker

  • Health

    Death begins in the colon. I had incorrectly placed its origins in algebra class; nevertheless, I have it on good authority (Dr. Natura, as seen on TV, creator of the Colonix Program) that death begins in the colon. On this happy note, we enter into spring, a time of rebirth, renewal, refunds, and spring cleaning.…

  • Rake Appeal { Home

    Gardening trends come and go. Vegetable gardens were big (literally) when families had great hordes of kids. English gardens had their day—along with Laura Ashley. “Naturalizing,” in the nineties, reflected a permissive era, but proved a natural habitat for neighbor complaints. Without coming right out and saying I wanted to school the scarecrow next door,…

  • Diamonds in the Rough

    Karl Commers was first up. The earnest mail carrier went through a door behind the stage and came out a few minutes later in a comprehensively sparkly shirt, the spitting image of … James Taylor. He gets that a lot, he said, but has no immediate plans to impersonate James Taylor. Firing up the fog…

  • "I Made a Pig of Myself!"

    The Mother-Goose-does-Vegas tone of the TCF Holidazzle Parade seemed at odds with my method acting background. With more than two hundred and fifty lighted characters brought to life by a different group of volunteer actors each of the twenty-one evenings the parade marches between November 25 and December 23, a cohort of dressers, lighting technicians,…

  • The Test

    The Foreign Service Exam, that portal into the exciting world of international diplomacy, is given once a year, in the spring, on the same day in thousands of locations across the country. Results of the test arrive in the mailboxes of test-takers in the fall. For some, these are not pretty. There are four parts:…

  • Leaving Home Without It

    I don’t get out much, ergo my love for vicarious road trips. As an armchair traveler, it’s important to choose your writer as carefully as you would a travel companion. This has become a more difficult undertaking in recent years, however. The booming “adventure travel” sector of the industry has spawned both a motor coach…