This All Seems Very Familiar.

Do You Remember Mary Mount?

That’s the question I asked my younger sister as we worked together, peeling the skins off the apples we’d picked at a neighbor’s orchard. Here I am, 51, my sister three years younger. We still live not far from each other in the Fairfield County town we grew up in. My sister doesn’t remember. She was too young. But I can’t forget.

If you want to create a weird goth/true crime-loving child, my parents had the perfect formula, which was moving our family into an abandoned convent on the grounds of the former seminary for the Congregation of the Holy Spirit & the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Connecticut.

It was the summer of 1972 and I was 7. Our new home had two family graveyards on the property, an old greenhouse full of broken glass, and a well house with an infinitely deep hole in the floor. The house was in a heavily wooded area on the border of a town called New Canaan. During the summer, my mom would get a break from us by loading my sisters and me into the station wagon and driving us to Nature Day Camp. About a mile away from our house my mom would point to an area in the woods as we drove by and say, “that’s where little Mary Mount was murdered.”

Mary Mount was a 10-year old girl who police first thought had been kidnapped. That changed when her body was discovered by 2 boys looking for a fishing spot. She had been bludgeoned to death with a rock, and that’s all we knew. It remained an unsolved case; something that kept my sisters and I wondering at night after we were tucked into bed in our big creepy house. The area where poor Mary was discovered looked identical to the woods we played in (unsupervised) all summer long. The mystery of her death never left me. Also, what the hell was wrong with my mother for telling us that?

One night, as I sat at my computer with a glass of wine, I googled Mary Mount. In a few key strokes I saw her name appear. I learned that Six other girls had also gone missing over the course of several years in Connecticut, their bodies all found in the woods. Then 5-year old Jennifer Noon disappeared as she walked home from school (It was the 70s, remember? All kids were free-range). The discovery of her body brought the number of children who had been slain in Connecticut from 1969 - 1972 to seven.

It wasn’t until 23 years later that local police interviewed Harold Meade, a 52-year-old former tow truck driver and god-damned ice cream vendor who was serving a life term for three other murders. A month before Jennifer Noon's disappearance, Meade had killed three mentally disabled residents of group home who were out taking a walk. The skulls of all three were smashed with rocks, and their bodies left in wooded areas.

Harold confessed to the group home murders, but denied killing Mary Mount, Jennifer Noon, or any of the other children. In 1972, he was sentenced to life in prison. According to police and other sources, while he was incarcerated he repeatedly bragged that those three were not his only victims. In a letter written to the state's Board of Parole nearly 20 years after the murders, the Connecticut State's Attorney said that prosecutors at the time considered Meade a suspect in the girls' killings, but did not follow through because they assumed he'd be in prison for life anyway. He wrote, “As a result of this assumption, other serious crimes in which Mr. Mead was a suspect were not pursued to the point of arrest.”

Investigators have re-examined some of the cases over the years, but none of the investigations have resulted in arrests. In a phone interview, Meade said he was tired of the accusations. He told a reporter, “If they think I'm a killer, then come and get me.” Harold Meade passed away on December 9, 2007 in the MacDougall-Walker Prison in Suffield, Connecticut.

I think about Mary Mount a lot, as I live with my husband and son in a house about 2 miles away from my childhood home. My parents eventually managed to redo the dilapidated convent and sell it for a profit. My sisters and I always played in the woods, and despite the uncovered well and the shattered greenhouse, none of us died, although I did get bitten by a non-poisonous snake once. I look back at my bizarrely unsupervised childhood and worry that my son isn’t as tough as my sisters and I were at the same age. On the up side, he never worries that he’ll be hit over the head with a rock.

Be brave, little rabbit. Take a chance.

Here It Is!  Joseph City, AZ

Along the 66… Cheers!

Comet McNaught

My husband grew up in Encino, California. He was the youngest of eight, and his mother, probably in desperation, fed them a variety of junky convenience foods. To this day, he reverts to Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and Chips Ahoy when he’s not feeling well. It bothers me, for some reason. It might because I find his mother chilly and unnurturing; I think, “of course she fed her kids that crap.” The fact that he finds that food comforting makes me think of a beaten dog returning to its master. It’s a little overly dramatic, I know.

The Most Beautiful Mathematical Equations. 1. General Relativity The equation above was formulated by Einstein as part of his groundbreaking general theory of relativity in 1915. The theory revolutionized how scientists understood gravity by describing the force as a warping of the fabric of space and time. The right-hand side of this equation describes the energy contents of our universe (including the ‘dark energy’ that propels the current cosmic acceleration). The left-hand side describes the geometry of space-time. The equality reflects the fact that in Einstein’s general relativity, mass and energy determine the geometry, and concomitantly the curvature, which is a manifestation of what we call gravity. 2. Standard Model This equation describes the collection of fundamental particles currently thought to make up our universe. It has successfully described all elementary particles and forces that we’ve observed in the laboratory to date - except gravity, including recently discovered Higgs boson and phi in the formula. It is fully self-consistent with quantum mechanics and special relativity. 3. The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus  This equation forms the backbone of the mathematical method known as calculus, and links its two main ideas, the concept of the integral and the concept of the derivative. It allows us to determine the net change over an interval based on the rate of change over the entire interval. The seeds of calculus began in ancient times, but much of it was put together in the 17th century by Isaac Newton, who used calculus to describe the motions of the planets around the sun. 4. 1 = 0.999999999…. This simple equation states that the quantity 0.999 followed by an infinite string of nines is equivalent to one, and is made by mathematician Steven Strogatz of Cornell University. Many people don’t believe it could be true. It’s also beautifully balanced. The left side represents the beginning of mathematics; the right side represents the mysteries of infinity. 5. Special Relativity Einstein makes the list again with his formulas for special relativity, which describes how time and space aren’t absolute concepts, but rather are relative depending on the speed of the observer. It shows how time dilates, or slows down, the faster a person is moving in any direction. 6. Euler’s Equation This simple formula encapsulates something pure about the nature of spheres. It says that if you cut the surface of a sphere up into faces, edges and vertices, and let F be the number of faces, E the number of edges and V the number of vertices, you will always get V – E + F = 2. So, for example, take a tetrahedron, consisting of four triangles, six edges and four vertices. If you blew hard into a tetrahedron with flexible faces, you could round it off into a sphere, so in that sense, a sphere can be cut into four faces, six edges and four vertices. And we see that V – E + F = 2. Same holds for a pyramid with five faces - four triangular, and one square - eight edges and five vertices, and any other combination of faces, edges and vertices. The combinatorics of the vertices, edges and faces is capturing something very fundamental about the shape of a sphere. 7. Euler–Lagrange Equations and Noether’s Theorem In this equation, L stands for the Lagrangian, which is a measure of energy in a physical system, such as springs, or levers or fundamental particles. Solving this equation tells you how the system will evolve with time. A spinoff of the Lagrangian equation is called Noether’s theorem. Informally, the theorem is that if your system has a symmetry, then there is a corresponding conservation law. For example, the idea that the fundamental laws of physics are the same today as tomorrow (time symmetry) implies that energy is conserved. The idea that the laws of physics are the same here as they are in outer space implies that momentum is conserved.  8. The Callan-Symanzik Equation Basic physics tells us that the gravitational force, and the electrical force, between two objects is proportional to the inverse of the distance between them squared. However, tiny quantum fluctuations can slightly alter a force’s dependence on distance, which has dramatic consequences for the strong nuclear force. What the Callan-Symanzik equation does is relate this dramatic and difficult-to-calculate effect, important when the distance is roughly the size of a proton, to more subtle but easier-to-calculate effects that can be measured when the distance is much smaller than a proton. 9. The Minimal Surface Equation The minimal surface equation somehow encodes the beautiful soap films that form on wire boundaries when you dip them in soapy water. The fact that the equation is ‘nonlinear,’ involving powers and products of derivatives, is the coded mathematical hint for the surprising behavior of soap films. 

Today is the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and we are still fighting for a woman's right to bodily autonomy. Kiki Smith, Sleeping woman with standing wolf, 2004

The Mr and I hiked up the Bürgenstock after the rain and it was beautiful. I hope we go back one day.

Tumblr after December 17th.

This makes me so sad.

blue

Twilight

Clarence Gagnon, 1913, oil on canvas

I adore this man.

“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

James Baldwin.