Patricia McMurry: Curiosity shaped my view of the world

Do you remember when your child entered a stage when their favorite word was why? My parents would tell you I never outgrew such wonderment. I later added other words of where, when and what to my queries.

As a young child, many of my questions were about nature. Simple things. For instance, my older sister decided we should operate on ants to remove their stingers to learn how it affected them. If it did not kill them, we would know how to eliminate their sting. I know that seems mean and a bit sadistic, but we had been stung by enormous Texas ants many times, and we had no mercy for them. An empty match box was our ambulance, and a sharp pointy stick was our scalpel. From this and other older sister driven ideas, I learned to find answers from experimentation.