Posts by Janet Ann Collins

Do you know why February is the shortest month of the year? The Roman calendar started the year in March because that was the beginning of Spring. All the months alternated between 30 and 31 days. Some of our months are still named after Roman gods and goddesses and from September to December the names…

In June, 1954 I was sent to the Stanford Convalescent Home on the campus of Stanford University in California because of my severe, chronic asthma. All new patients spent the first week in the unit with babies and little kids. While in that unit I met a three year old girl named Gladys and my…

I’ve probably shared this in the past, but it seems relevant for Valentine’s Day.My college Psychology professor taught us this definition of love:“When the happiness and well-being of another is essential to one’s own happiness and well-being, a state of love exists.”In spite of all the terrible things happening in the world, I hope we…

When I was a kid my bedtime was 8:00 p.m. and for about ten years as an adult I had a job with rotating shifts so I didn’t have a regular sleep schedule. But for most of my life I went to bed at about 10:00 p.m. and got up at about 6:00 in the…

2020 was the longest year in history. But January 2021 went by surprisingly quickly. Hopefully, the worst of the nasty politics is over (though I still see a lot on places like Facebook) and we won’t have more riots, hurricanes, fires, etc. With vaccines becoming available the Covid epidemic may be over soon and the…

(This is not a political statement advocating abortions. Instead, it’s a heads up about what could happen if abortions become illegal.) Back in the 1950s and early ‘60s abortions were illegal and most people agreed that they were wrong. Only desperate women would have them. I knew of someone planning to flee from an abusive…

Back in the 1940s there was an epidemic of polio.My father caught it and was sent to the Shriners Hospital for Women and Children in San Francisco. That was the only place the disease was treated because polio was called Infantile Paralysis.I was mildly sick for a day or two while he was in the…

In spite of all the problems in our world today, there’s one thing we can be grateful for: modern technology. Yes, a lot of problems come with it, but just imagine being back in the early 1900s. They had telephones, but you had to go through an operator to make a call and it cost…

Back during the Spanish influenza epidemic (they didn’t call it flu back then) my father was sent to live with his grandparents in the Appalachian Mountains because it was safer to be away from the crowded city.At the end of the school year he was able to return home.His grandparents gave him the kerosine lamp…