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Dotty Holcomb Doherty
My childhood days were spent roaming the forests and beaches of my southeastern Massachusetts home and weeding our vegetable gardens. Play and chores dominated life for my twin sister Patty and me;...view moreMy childhood days were spent roaming the forests and beaches of my southeastern Massachusetts home and weeding our vegetable gardens. Play and chores dominated life for my twin sister Patty and me; our friends a short bike ride away; our grandparents just over a mile past the two-room schoolhouse where we went to first and second grade, past Salvadors Ice Cream (known as The Can because it looked like a giant milk can) where chocolate chip in a sugar cone, Sweet Tarts, and stuffed quahogs were the best. Mom had stopped working as a banktrust clerk when she married and (shock!) had twins because no woman she knew in the 1950s continued to work after children. Dad designed machines for Continental Screw Company. Both bowled and loved boating, though Dad, without even telling Mom, sold his cabin cruiser three days after we were born. Our two acres held vegetable and flower gardens; apple and peach trees; plus woods, a pond, and a marsh behind to explore to my heart's content.Transitions led me in directions I never would have imagined. A four-sport varsity jock in high school (we managed to fit in volleyball season after field hockey and basketball and before softball), a bicycle addict, and a physiology/pre-calc/Français-loving student, I followed my Quaker roots and left New England for the first time to venture to Richmond, Indiana and Earlham College.Four years, three varsity sports (field hockey, basketball, and my new love, lacrosse), a biology degree emphasizing field sciences, and countless friends later, I left Earlham with greater self-confidence and a passion for birding and traveling in the wilderness. I had gone on Southwest Field Studies for my off-campus program, studying natural history, land use management, and experiential education in the grandest of classrooms: the Grand Canyon, Organ Pipe National Monument, Big Bend, Texas, and the arboretums, parks and museums in between. This program gave me the skills and nerve to lead Earlham's month-long preterm Water Wilderness canoeing program in Ontario. But it was Dotty Douglas, my senior seminar professor, whose statement after I gave a presentation steered me toward my career: "Do you know what a good teacher you are?"Internships banding birds at Manomet Bird Observatory in coastal Massachusetts, teaching at Tatnic Hill School for Environmental Studies in Wells, Maine, and working as an interpretive guide on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon all served me well when I found my calling in high school science teaching at Sandy Spring Friends School in Maryland. Earlham had given me another gift. Jonathan. After marriage and backpacking the Rockies, WindRiver Range, and peaks of Glacier National Park for our honeymoon, we settled back in Maryland where I was teaching, coaching, and leading wilderness trips at Sandy Spring, until graduate school for Jonathan led us to Philadelphia. There, I continued in my same roles at Friends Central. Two baby daughters enriched our family, and a move to White Salmon, Washington for Jonathan's new job and coaching for me brought new lifelong friends but also the onset of my health problems. I was forced to see myself in other ways besides a jock and wilderness leader. It wasn't easy, and the struggle continued when we moved to Annapolis, Maryland and my renewed teaching career at Sandy Spring was cut short by MS. Leaving the classroom, kayaking the ChesapeakeBay, and wandering her woodlands and marshes led to another transition I couldn't have predicted: From teacher to writer to wildlife photographer, world traveler, poet. That girl kicking around the shores of South Dartmouth never would have believed it, but she would have been thrilled.view less