Middle-Aged 19th Century Lady Naturalist Face

When I was eighteen I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I was (keep this quiet) bad at math. So I went into natural history museum studies. Fabulous field. Nerdly. There's a place for us. I love things under glass and collections. I could stand for hours under the belly of blue whale at the Museum of Natural History in New York:

I'm standing there.

Then I had my kids. I quit work and started writing handwring-y confessional personal parenting essays. I can honestly say now that I wish I hadn't written any of them. I honed a voice. That voice was in service only to Myself, queen of The Upright Pronoun, and I'm in a different place now. Ha. Older. I want to learn about other people. Other pasts, other futures. Hence, 19th Century Lady Naturalist.

If, when I was an undergraduate at Smith researching early ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey, you had told me that in my mid-40s I would do so again and follow the hashtag #womeninnathis and want to dress up like #gowithFlo and lead nature walks in Victorian costume I would have said, Are you kidding? That is most awesome. I WISH.

The great thing about middle age is renaissance.