BY LIZA STROUT - Michael Miller was born in Peoria, Ill., the second of seven children. His father was a carpet layer, his mother a homemaker.

As he puts it, “We were relatively poor. Not middle-class, but poor.”

When he was a child, he went to work with his father. Back then, you didn’t iron carpet to join them at a seam, you used to whip them. Sew them together with surgical needles. Work became a habit that has lasted his whole life.

Christine Minshall Haynes, 92, passed away quietly on Monday, Jan. 9, 2012, surrounded by all of her children, at her home in Boca Grande.

This was as it should be. Recently asked her preference regarding her obituary, she said that she wanted it to state, simply, “She be gone...” This is classic Chris. However, dissuaded from this course by friends and family, who were convinced that a mere three words would not suffice:

I  realized something at dinner Wednesday night. Sitting at the table with my four children, spending an hour urging them eat their food, pleading and yelling for the green beans and other healthy food to disappear, I found that I was watching a metaphor in progress.

You see, my kids have been sick lately. All of them. For what seems like a very, very long time. So when I went to the grocery store this weekend I took special care to spend a little extra money to get healthy food that they would, theoretically, enjoy.

Everything in theory sounds great, doesn’t it?

BY LIZA STROUT - It started as a whisper, and over the last few months has gathered steam. Word on the street is that the island real estate market is recovering by leaps and bounds.

While 2011 sales numbers showed the Charlotte County market was up by 11 percent and Sarasota was up by 17 percent, Gasparilla Island is up by 57 percent.