Diana Stockton is an artist, writer, scholar, and equestrian, living in St. Helena, California.

The radio was a real companion growing up. Mine sat on my bedside table. It was small and brown with a light and a red thing for the stations with a hole in the side of its celluloid cover over the station numbers where I’d dug it away to let out a gnat once. I fell asleep listening to this radio just above my head, for years. For a very long time, well after I’d moved away from home, I hated sleeping on my other side. I felt out of balance and the ear that was up got cold. The other ear, used to being out, never did. I told a medical student about it once and he was delighted. He recognized my symptoms as the exact same ones he’d just learned hard rock miners suffer from always lying on their same side digging ore.

Diana Stockton