My dad carrying me on his back through the woods of Massachusetts
My parents met while teaching at a school for deaf boys, which meant both that they were fluent in sign language and liked a certain degree of quiet. This last bit has always been particularly true of my dad, a man who’s been known to disappear for whole days on nature trails and has read every single Russian or French novel that’s ever weighed in at over 1,000 pages. Fittingly, my sisters and I bonded with him over mellow activities in our childhood – be it through exploring Boston’s Arnold Arboretum, dissecting the characters of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” or taste testing pizzas all around New England. Another quiet obsession he tried to draw us into long ago was that of deer hunting, err gazing…