Growing Like Weeds

December is over—almost officially—and I refuse to call her a “crazy” month. She deserves better. December—the month, yes, she’s a woman—always seems marked by unrealistic ambition and overdrawn reflection. I exhibited neither.

My family and I went on a cruise (Royal Caribbean) to the Bahamas during Christmas Week, and I did not crack my laptop open once. My phone was little more than decoration on the built-in nightstand. I was riding a high I’d never felt before: publication.

My biography of Vera Katherine Charles, part of the Science History Institute’s Scientific Biographies online exhibit, is finally live.

After finishing my coursework, packing the kids’ suitcases with clothes for three seasons of weather, cleaning the house so we wouldn’t return to a domestic tsunami, and tying up loose ends at my actual job, sitting in a beach chair under the sun felt like reaching the top of a summit.

If there were another lift—another kind of mountaintop to reach—it was reading the published biography itself. The summit of summits, and a hell of a way to close out 2025.