Sixty-three

It's been sixty-three years since I left Sutherland.

The colonists in North America in seventeen sixty-three were very different from those who had settled there more than one hundred years before. They had different ideas. They had come to consider their colonial legislatures as smaller, but similar to the British Parliament in London. These smaller parliaments had helped the colonists rule themselves for more than one hundred years. The colonists began to feel that their legislatures should also have the powers that the British Parliament had.

Earlier this month, The Lancet medical journal published findings from a study of aspirin and cancer. Researchers followed almost one thousand patients who had Lynch syndrome — a genetic condition that makes them likely to develop some cancers. One group of patients took six hundred milligrams of aspirin a day for at least two years. These patients had a sixty-three percent lower risk of colorectal cancer than those who took a harmless substance or placebo. The longer they took aspirin, the lower their risk of cancer.