Marien Helz is originally from Gaithersburg and began writing the Growing Up in Gaithersburg column for an HOA paper in 2003.

She holds a Master's degree in English and American literature from the University of Iowa, a Master of Fine of Arts degree from the world renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop [the only organization to receive the National Humanities Medal, presented by the U.S. government in 2003], a Master's degree from the University of Buffalo Reading Specialist Program, and a PhD in English Research from the University of Buffalo.

She splits her time between Kentlands and a classic village in the Buffalo-Niagara region of Western New York state where she is a college professor–a  profession she began at the age of twenty-two.

Marien Helz's most recent past columns are available here in Adobe files.    Click on the underlined links below to access the Adobe files.    If you do not have Adobe on your computer, you can download a free copy here:

1. Happening   September 2005
2. Wedding   October 2005
3. Figurine   November 2005
4. Gifts and Giving   December 2005

17. Treasures.  January 2007 in Commentary
18. Paperboy.  February 2007 in Commentary
19. The Final Snow and The Follies. March 2007 in Commentary
20. Renewal. April 2007 in Commentary
21. Scouting. May 2007 in Commentary
22. Trains. June 2007 in Commentary
23. Woods. July 2007 in Commentary
24. Dogs and I’m-so-Fine-the-Law-Doesn’t-Apply-to-Me People  August 2007 in Commentary
25. Magic Soil. September 2007 in Commentary
26. Mean Teachers. October 2007 in Commentary
27. Sound   November and December 2007 in Commentary
28. Childhood Friends   January 2008 in Commentary
29. Nosy Neighbors   February 2008 in Commentary
30. Science Fair   March, April, & May 2008 in Commentary
31. Wisconsin in August   June & July 2008 in Commentary
32. Weeds: Annoying to Disastrous   August, September, & October 2008 in Commentary
33. Charlie   November, December, January 2009 in Commentary
34. Memories from My Mother   February, March, April 2009 in Commentary
35. Movie Houses   May, June, July 2009 in Commentary
36. Labor Day Parade   August, September, October 2009 in Commentary
37. Moving Back   November, December, January 2009-10 in Commentary

...continued from the Commentary page:

had been coated with a thick sheet of ice. Cars could not move without spinning. I walked very, very gingerly back and got all the half mile back without falling, and then slipped as I just reached the dorm. I grabbed the railing, but it was coated with ice, and I slid all the way down.

The second year at Iowa, I lived in a room more than a mile off campus. There were no cooking facilities, and I had no car. If I wanted one meal a day, I had to walk more than a mile to a diner and then more than a mile back once a day. The temperature was twenty below zero for several weeks. They didn’t measure wind-chill then, but there was a strong wind. It was not too bad on a weekday because I could warm up in a classroom before making the long trip back. One weekend day when I was going to get my one daily meal, I got so cold that I could barely breathe and scarcely move. In spite of my Goldilocks story lesson about not going into places you don’t belong, I ducked into a private building and waited in the hall until I was warm enough to make the rest of the trip.

While I was in college in the dead center of Wisconsin, it usually snowed from November to April. One Spring evening, I had gone to a literary event, and was dressed the way one was expected to at the time: heels and skirts, no blue jeans or slacks of any kind. The snow was cut neatly right at the edge of the sidewalks making a four foot wall on either side. It had been above freezing during the day, but cooled at night so that the snow, which had melted in the day, formed a river of ice all down the sidewalk at night. The shoveling had been done well enough that there was no side of the walk where one might have gotten some traction. Warily, I looked at the incline up to the dorm and proceeded very carefully. But I slipped. I landed on my knees, and then to my horror, I slid down the hill. I hadn’t even made any progress after all the effort! After several repeats of that, some girls who were standing at the dorm entrance and were wearing sneakers, came down and each took one of my arms and got me all the way up the hill.

It is, of course, a cosmic irony that after living in Buffalo, New York, for decades I was in Kentlands for what was labeled as the worst snow in a hundred years on January 7, 1996. I am grateful to have missed the storms of the ’09-’10 season, although January 7 and 8, 1996, still holds the record for most snowfall in a one and two day period for this area.

We were once thinking about a vacations place and looked at Deep Creek Lake. The realtor bragged that they usually got 200 inches of snow a year.

“Some winters we get 400 inches,” a builder trying to sell his properties with her crowed.

Now, Buffalo gets more snow that most places in the lower 48, and the worst winter on record was 199.5 inches of the ’76-‘77 winter. I checked the facts on-line, and the Deep Creek area doesn’t get a quarter of the what the builder claimed. None-the-less, we were amused at how wrong the realtor read us despite all the information we gave her. We were interested in escaping snow, not chasing it.

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