March 2025

After five minutes sitting in our fort, Randy said, “How about we go pop bottle hunting?” He could have stopped at “How about we go–.” Yes, let’s go.
It was a smart decision. We could collect two cents for every pop bottle we found and turn that into candy at the local store. Our underground fort could never match that return.

Imagine this scene: Dougie and Cindee Gangler have a beautiful young daughter named Phoebe Darling. She’s twelve years old (her preferred pronouns are ‘who’ and ‘whose,’ but that’s another story), and when she was five years old, her bedroom housed over three hundred stuffed animals, all sitting facing an actual stage situated along the far wall. After all, Phoebe was a star in the making.

On our refrigerator at home dwells a magnet stating, “Dorothy was right. There’s no place like home.” At face value, I could list other places which have no comparative competition. For example, there’s no place like a barber shop. Or there’s no place like the inside of a silo.