"My Weekly Reader" kept us up-to-date on current events during my elementary school years.

I graduated from high school in 1974. That's one of the milestones in your life that you use to measure any number of things, for many years after the fact. Here I am, nearly 42 years later, and I sometimes will still use it as a reference point.

Many things have happened historically since I was in school, meaning I would not have learned them from my textbooks or as current events in the little weekly newspaper I remember getting all through elementary school.

Today's Google Doodle commemorated one such event that happened after my high school graduation, once again bringing home the fact that I'm not getting any younger.


On January 9, 1975, Ken Brugger and his wife, Cathy, first walked into the sanctuary of monarchs as they clung to the oyamel fir trees in Sierra Madre mountains, in the state of Michoacán, in Central Mexico. Prior to this, the exact location of where the monarchs went was not known.

The discovery had been decades in the making. It would be more than a year-and-a-half before National Geographic made the announcement in the August 1976 issue.

My dream is to make the trip to Mexico to see the monarchs as they are overwintering, knowing that some of them may have nectared in my garden here in Ohio. Some of them may have even been born at Our Little Acre.

A monarch ecloses September 5, 2015