When I was a little girl, my mother told me stories by the hour. They were wonderful stories that her grandmother had shared with her.

Reporting from Bagram, Afghanistan . . .

Reporting to you from Bagram, Afghanistan… As I wrote last month, I am currently on a temporary duty assignment with the Bagram Reconstruction Team, located in the north central part of Afghanistan. I will be here until the end of January 2007. For the next eight months, I will write my article from here.

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.

One thing that always bugged me as a kid was that our cows weren’t very patriotic. Sure, they’d act silly if they ever saw fireworks, but they never saluted the flag, showed interest in our national anthem and certainly never took off work for the Fourth of July. (Come to think of it, they were pretty disrespectful on Christmas, too.)

When my adviser informed me he thought I should take a course in animal welfare offered here at Purdue, I was more than a little nervous about what stood in front of me. Having spent my entire life in the dairy industry, I had many preconceived notions about animal welfare, based largely on the efforts of extreme animal rights groups such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). In my mind, the dairy industry and animal welfare were two diametrically opposed forces destined to perpetual disagreements, with little hope for harmony. I now see this could not be further from the truth.

Yesterday as I was sifting flour into my new batch of bread, I smiled as I remembered how my mother taught me to make bread when I was nine years old. She didn’t give me a recipe card with neat measurements and full-color glossy photographs to show me the end result. She simply said, “This is how Grandma taught me to do it.”