Good Monday morning! This morning it actually felt cool. It is apparent that the season is changing. The sunlight is flatter, thinner and more white and the cicadas are so noisy at dusk. It gets dark at 5pm now. The sunsets are also more glorious every evening. I hope everyone is as safe as they can be during Sandy. I forgot to include this quote from Ted speaker Shirley Thompson in yesterday’s post. I loved it so much I wrote it down. So here it is, but first a bit of context. Miss Thompson told us that as a little black girl in mostly white London, she grew up reading fairy stories. She dreamed of a happy ending, but this feeling was smashed when her teachers started deliberately lowering her straight A marks so that she would not be admissible to the best schools. Here is her quote:

“Just because I was written out of history, doesn’t mean to say that I wasn’t then going to put myself in there.”

She went on to say that she forged her own path from that moment on, fighting through racism and other obstacles. She is now the only female European conductor.