I have many fond memories of Alice Winkel. I was always inspired by her absolute determination to be in charge of her life. Sometimes she included me in her efforts. She would ask me to give her the gift of laughter, and then she would give the same gift to me.
One day last summer she called to say that she needed to be cheered up. She wondered if I would be available to spit cherry pits from my office balcony. I gathered a small crowd of Hope House staff. It was our first day of orientation with a visiting scholar from Australia. She joined us. Alice brought her mother, and a huge bag of cherries. Out onto the balcony we filed and the spitting began.
Some of us were better spitters than others. The best spitters of all were the professors in the crowd. They taught us to shape our tongues like a canal and blow the stones forcefully along the trench. Alice, in her truly considerate fashion, had brought some washed pits so we wouldn’t have to make ourselves sick eating too many cherries. But we didn’t use them. We all ate too many cherries.
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