Posts by Anne Evans-Cazier, LCSW

I suppose it wasn’t really her fault. Well, I can say that now, but at the time I could barely look her in the eye.    I had just turned 12 and started the seventh grade, my first year of what was then known as Junior High. There were lots of terrifying firsts for a…

  That’s my grandpa on the phone, the red power phone. We were in a beautiful hotel in Tokyo, summer 1972. It was a wonderful trip, but at that particular moment, no one was having fun yet.    You see, Grandpa didn’t speak Japanese, and whoever he was talking to clearly didn’t speak English, so…

I wish my family was different. I wish we didn’t fit right in with the global norms. But we do.   We have five school age grandchildren. I wish I could somehow magically protect them from the impact kids around the world are feeling as the pandemic continues to dramatically disrupt their lives.    You…

“Any color but red!” responded the seasoned public school teacher when I asked what colors I should use to show progress through the stages of Conquering Homework in Middle School, our new membership program for parents.   That got me thinking about the association of red with failure in school. I still cringe at the…

I was in a meeting recently with several colleagues, all skillful, talented, and successful in their own right. One of them brought up a professional challenge and my friend Lori replied, “Oh, I’m good at that.”    Just a simple statement of competency. We started to talk about how refreshing it was to hear someone…

First light. Such a beautiful time for a walk along the Colorado River. The autumn chill in the air felt delicious after the long, hot summer. I was excited as I pulled on my boots, jacket and knit beanie, then slipped out of the tiny cabin we had rented for the weekend.   Later in…

One lovely autumn day my little brothers and their friends were having a glorious time in our backyard. We had a huge horse chestnut tree out there and they were raking leaves into piles, then running and jumping into them.    The way I heard the story later, it wasn’t long before they started looking…