Bonsai Tree: A Lesson in History
One day during my recent visit to New York, my friend and I walked through the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Early March is not the best time to see this Botanical Garden. The day was cold, and the wind blew. Most of the trees and plants were dead or dormant. The only blooms we saw outside […]
The Perfect Pi Day (3-14-16) and the Difficulty of Acting Imperfectly
There is nothing connecting the two topics of this post—Pi Day and deliberately bad acting—except that I noticed them on the same day recently. I was in New York City spending time with a friend. We were in Manhattan to see two shows. Both were comedies, and we laughed uproariously. In between the shows, we […]
Nursery School: Singing in the Rain
The Willamette Valley is wet. That’s what I remember most about the winters when we lived in Corvallis, Oregon, between 1959 and 1961. As I am writing my current work-in-progress, I find it easy to write about winters on homesteads near Oregon City—I just think of my preschool days. Wet. Dark. Depressing. It isn’t a […]
Fear of Drilling? You Betcha
As I sat in the dentist’s office a couple of weeks ago waiting for the anesthetic to take hold, I worked on a crossword puzzle. The clue for one of the longer words in the puzzle was “Fear associated with drilling.” The answer was not apparent to me. I worked around the word, and soon […]
My Mother’s Last Doll
I’ve written before about my first doll. I’ve written about my mother’s Storybook Bride doll that I could never play with. And I’ve written about the sewing doll that my grandmother and I made clothes for. This post is about my mother’s last doll. It wasn’t really a doll. It was a knitted humanoid figure […]
Leap Year: A Four-Year Assessment of Life
I haven’t written a post about leap year before. The opportunity only comes along once every four years, and I had barely started writing this blog in February 2012. I tend to use mile markers to assess my life over the longer term. For example, on a major birthday, I might ask myself what I […]
Jessie Benton Frémont: One Woman’s Perspective on the Californian Gold Rush
The sequel to Lead Me Home takes place during the California Gold Rush and the development of California as a state. Some scenes are set in Monterey, California, during the Constitutional Convention of 1849. That convention was full of early California luminaries—delegates included John C. Frémont and Lansford Hasting, both of whom had written guides […]
Binge Reading
Admit it. You’ve done it. I’ll bet 90% of my readers have done it. You’ve stayed up too late reading. Or you’ve neglected your job or housework or other obligations to read just one more chapter. It’s called binge reading. It’s a recognized disorder. There’s even a WikiHow on the steps to do it. I’m […]
A Story I Couldn’t Tell Before: The Sister I Never Knew
Shortly before my mother’s death, my father and I reviewed the draft obituaries my parents had written for themselves several years earlier, long before my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. At the time my father showed me the obituaries, my mother was about to go into hospice. We knew we would probably need her obituary […]
The Awesome Wonder of Gravitational Waves
I don’t usually write about science, because I don’t know much about it. I haven’t taken a science class since Physics in my senior year of high school. What impressed me most when I learned about waves in that class was that wave theory explained music—why some chords sound wonderful and others discordant. I could […]