Erica Bertram

Looking Back

Are you a history buff? Do you want your kids to know all of world history, inside and out? Are you subconsciously planning on one or more members of your immediate family ending up on Jeopardy at a young age and blowing everyone away with their effortless recitation of Justinian’s code, in its entirety? No? […]

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Your Inner Scrooge

The plan was to read A Christmas Carol, evenly distributed throughout the period of Advent, concluding on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately, my family loves this story so much, we ended up finishing it two weeks early. As a kid, I remember disliking the story, mostly due to the dark cinematography of the various

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Hard Work

Happy independence day. Well, that was the sentiment I passed on to my eleven-year-old when I finally decided to relinquish my obsessive need to oversee every operation that went on in the kitchen, and allow her the freedom to make herself a hot breakfast at whim. As exhausting as the years were of tying every

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A Good Book

I had a beautiful leather bag in the 4th grade in which I kept what any little girl would keep: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Tennyson, and a journal. It’s funny, but it’s no joke. I was a bookworm in the deepest sense of the word. I have always had a

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Nice View

After living in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for most of my early life, the mountains in Maine seemed more like, well, hills. For the first few years I carried around a kind of dissatisfaction; a sentiment that, try as Maine might, it will never be New Hampshire. This kind of attitude kept me

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