Once upon a time – going back to the 13th century, actually – the word diet meant much more than the food we consume. It derived from the Greek word diaita, which signified a way of life that comprised not just food but the entire gamut of healthy living, including exercise and other healthy habits. Fast forward to the 21st century, when the word diet is more popularly used as a verb and now typically refers more to the foods we don’t eat than those we do. How did this happen, what are its implications, and how can we change this mindset?

Unlike in our grandparents’ time, we live today in an age of excess, in which food is all around us all the time. We eat more and move less. And so we gain weight, plain and simple. To reverse the effects of weight gain, we occasionally restrict our food, until we lose some weight. We either meet goal or give up. Either way, we eventually resume our “normal” mode of eating, and the weight we lost soon returns, often in spades. And the cycle inevitably resumes, so that dieting becomes a yo-yo activity with no end in sight.

These days, when we say we are “heading to the airport,” we are usually referring to Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport (or BWI), a mere 35 minutes away. Who would have thought there were other options for locals here, almost a century ago, that were much, much closer to home. But that is exactly what I recently discovered! First, a little background is in order.

The Aviation Age Comes to Baltimore

On May 21, 1927, a new chapter was written in the annals of aviation history. His repugnant anti-Semitic views and abhorrent lack of family values notwithstanding, the fact remains that on that day Charles Lindbergh became the first person to complete a solo transatlantic flight, flying non-stop from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France. That achievement not only catapulted him into the stratospheres of public adulation and fame, but transformed the nascent aviation industry into the hottest, newest investment on Wall Street.

From the time I was a young girl, I have maintained a keen interest in genealogy, starting with family history and later expanding that interest to the history of time and place, which has helped to provide context and greater meaning to the personal narratives that I have assembled.

And a funny thought crossed my mind as I began to explore the history of my home and neighborhood: It can be said that a house can also have a genealogy, a provenance of sorts, similar to that of a piece of estate jewelry or a work of art. These thoughts intrigued me, and led me to discover some fascinating lore about some of the homes in our neighborhood, including my own, and about the people who had once lived in them.

Our family arrived in Baltimore in the early 1990s, and from the time we settled into our cozy colonial on Cross Country Boulevard, right down the road from Cross Country Elementary School, I regularly heard snippets of neighborhood lore from the “old timers” – like how there used to be a golf course in the vicinity before the homes were built (causing my boys to go on forays in the backyard for errant golf balls, which they sometimes found!), and how our block was built by a plumbing supply company (explaining the floor-to-ceiling tile work in most of the bathrooms) – not to mention passing comments from people who said they had played in our house when they were children, as friends of a classmate who once lived here.

Ah, Pesach around the corner. For a recovering clutteraholic, it is actually a wonderful spur for making headway into a never-ending pursuit of a clutter-free life. I’m not talking here about things that matter, that we use, or we truly enjoy and derive pleasure from. I’m referring to “stuff,” those things that sit around in every nook and cranny, that have lost their reason for being, that we have become mind-blind to even seeing anymore! Things that lurk and encroach on our physical spaces and intrude on our domestic peace and sense of well being.

Last month, as I began engaging

Over the course of the past 15 years, the internet has slowly insinuated itself into our lives in a way that is truly transformational. While not all of us have jumped on that bandwagon, it is safe to assume that most of us have – if not in our homes, certainly at our colleges and places of employment. We use it for email, to pay our bills, to catch up on the news, and to help our kids do research for school projects. Googling has become a household word. These are some of the positives of this amazing new medium