Janice D. Green, author

Mystery Insect – An Adult Male Glowworm

A few years ago a most peculiar insect flew into my office and landed on my sweater. Its antennae were huge in comparison to the size of the insect. I contacted my friend Eric Eaton who is an expert entomologist who told me I had a male Glowworm Beetle. He gave me this link with scientific information about this glowworm.

I recall going fishing with my family on a riverbank in Indiana at night as a child when my mom commented on the Glowworms on the river bank. Had it not been for that experience, I would have had no clue about Glowworms.

I still have some unanswered questions. I spent some time this week trying to learn more about them. I learned that the larva stage glows in the dark. Females continue to glow in the dark and their appearance doesn’t change much from the larva stage to the adult stage. They don’t grow wings, but the adults have only six legs. The large antennae and wings are only seen on the adult male beetles.

Finding joy in nature – Get outside!

I grew up in northern Indiana before we felt the need for an air conditioner. The only phones were connected by wire to a phone jack on the wall. The earliest phone I remember was a wooden box attached to the wall. We turned a crank to get the operator and told her who we wanted to talk to. Then she connected us to their line.

The only mail we got was delivered to our mailbox every day. Email was unheard of. In my earliest years, there was no TV, only a radio. I remember sitting on it so we could hear it with less static.

Before anyone finds a reason to think of me as deprived, I insist that the exact opposite is true. I had the privilege of finding newborn kittens in the barn, hunting morel mushrooms in the woods, floating in an animal watering trough in a swamp in the middle of a field, sitting in an apple tree and discovering a stick that turned into an inchworm. I found another stick that was really a spider. I could go on and on.

Outside ABCs – peek inside with this trailer

Kevin Collier did an outstanding job of creating a trailer for Outside ABCs. Click on the link and enjoy . . .

The Backstory of Outside ABCs

When persistence paid off

I am a rare author who grew up as a reluctant reader. To this day, my reading preference is for children’s literature, which is what I write. I remember enjoying theme-writing in my senior English class. There was something about writing on what I cared about that appealed to me.

I also wrote a few poems in high school. A classmate challenged me to write a few stanzas on a poem she had started. That was fun, so I wrote a few more poems. Since my father taught science and English in high school, I showed him my poems. He pointed out so many things that were wrong with them that I decided writing poetry was too hard, and I would never write them.

Flower Doll from an Althea Bush

When I was a little girl in Indiana my aunt showed me how to make a doll from the flower of the Althea Rose of Sharon bush. It grew in the front yard of our farm. The petals made a lovely long dress and the doll’s head was the unopened bud of another flower. A few years ago we were visiting my husband’s family in upstate New York when I noticed the same flowers blooming all around and took advantage of the opportunity to make one again.

To make this flower doll: