It all started with an email. 

Last July, I was at a crossroads. Being a freelance writer for a few years, my usual summer work dried up before the warm weather even arrived. The publications I was contributing to in Upstate New York were losing money, rapidly, with their freelance budgets being the first casualty of a haphazard newspaper industry.

Ever since we splurged on a $2.99 plastic magician’s wand at Santa’s Land last year, my daughter has treated us to the occasional magic show in the living room. They are 90 percent theatrics, and 10 percent tricks. 

It’s the question I get asked the most.

“Is there any music around tonight?”

My husband is from South Carolina — the state where you don’t have to wear helmets on a motorcycle and you can detonate a backyard fireworks’ show packing enough TNT to last Wile E. Coyote for a lifetime. 

It had been 10 years.

I kept thinking those words while boarding a plane in Charlotte this past weekend, bound for my hometown. Tucked far away in the northeast, awaiting my arrival was a 10-year high school reunion. 

Getting poison ivy is my official sign summer is here.

Like old men whose knees ache when there’s an impending storm, the symbolic rash and blisters are Mother Nature’s way of telling me spring is over. Ever since I was kid, I always seemed to catch poison ivy at least once during the summer months.

As a kid, my sister and I had an unspoken pact. If one of us heard Cyndi Lauper come on the radio, we promptly ran through the house hollering “Come quick, she’s on!” 

We have lots of bug barns in our house: from the old-fashioned Mason jar with holes punched in the lid to a new-fangled, plastic-domed “ladybug playground” with tiny slides and such.

I wager in most families bug barns are relegated to the backyard. Ours, however, take up residence on the kitchen table, with up to four bug barns simultaneously occupied by caterpillars, ants, moths, beetles and even spiders.

Count my daughter among the millions of kids whose first word was “doggy.” For a several-week stretch, “doggy” was also her only word. She used it liberally, be it a salutation for the grocery store clerk or pointing out a squirrel in the backyard.

We don’t have a dog anymore, but there’s something about dogs. Kids just love them. Mine are no exception.

Carolina Nights, a closed-down dinner theater in Maggie Valley, could make a comeback as an entertainment venue under new owners.

A Haywood County couple with a track record as local business partners bought the building last month for $235,000.