BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO ​

A life in the military has its pleasures and pains, but one aspect is both a pleasure and a pain: moving.
I come from a long line of movers, so you’d think I’d be used to it. My parents moved 15 times during my dad’s military career. The irony there is that they retired to Clinton County when I, the youngest of four, was a preschooler, so I attended Wilmington City Schools all my life — no out-of-state moves for 13 years.
Since leaving Wilmington after graduation, however, I’ve moved more times than I can count. And now, every few years, my husband and I get the urge to live somewhere new, to experience a different place.
We’ve always loved everywhere we’ve lived, and we have made close friends all over the United States. We’ve lived on both coasts and several places in the middle.
The downside is that we have left behind family and friends, some of whom we’ve never seen again. 
It’s hard to explain to people who’ve always had a choice where to live, but when the military tells you you’re going to move, you’re going to move. That’s why they call them “orders.” Sure, you have some input on your destiny, but the bottom line is that the military sends you where it needs you, when it needs you.

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO ​

You brush, you floss, you avoid all that Halloween candy. You try to take care of your teeth as best you can.
If you live in Wilmington, however, you can’t count on your city water supply to help prevent tooth decay. The city’s municipal water supply is not fluoridated.
Almost 91 percent of Ohioans served by public water supplies are served by systems with adequate fluoride levels, according to the Ohio Department of Health. 
Wilmington residents are not among them.
Wilmington is one of just 24 Ohio communities that is exempt from a state law that requires fluoridation of public water supplies that serve more than 5,000 people.
These are the kinds of things you find out when you have a preschooler with more cavities than she should have. 

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO ​

I’m not even sure sunscreen existed when I was a kid.
Back then, we used “tanning oil,” a coconut-scented concotion that actually accelerated the sun-damage process. Sometimes we bought its cheaper cousin, baby oil, which we used to baste ourselves like Thanksgiving turkeys. Zero SPF, baby.
This was the goal of my friends every summer: Become as tan as possible by the time school started again. The process involved an awful lot of “laying out,” an incredibly boring and stupid pastime that only improved with the invention of the boombox.
“Laying out” was what we did on our tri-fold lounge chairs, on rafts in a pool, or on silver, reflective NASA-like inventions created solely for reflecting as much sun as possible onto our young skin, rotating our bodies to face the sun as it moved across the sky.
Tanning was easier for me, thanks to Italian DNA, than it was for many of my fairer-skinned friends. They often became a painful pink color before their sunburns “turned to tan.”
Either way, we were blissfully unaware of ultraviolet rays’ effects on our epidermis.