rambling

New store, new finds

Back when I was really into sewing and making aprons all the time, I knew every fabric store in town, but school and travels and teaching and work all got in the way and I’ve neglected the local shops. On Saturday, I had some time to kill. The daughter was at a slumber party, the […]

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Starting Over, Again

Once upon a time there was a young girl, growing up in a small town. She rode her bike until the street lights came on at dusk. She read in her attic room from the small library she’d tagged with her own version of the Dewey decimal system. She learned to cook alongside her mother,

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Ersatz Remarks

One of the benefits of being [cough] 40, is that I’ve been on the Internet for a long, long time now. I made my first website in 1994. Back before ‘bots trolled these parts. But now they are everywhere, with all sorts of supposedly tricky ways of getting their links out there. The ones I

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the birth of a food

Most of the time, I just eat without thinking too hard about where the food is coming from. I avoid processed foods and work to get fresh fruits and veggies into my body every single day. It’s one of the lasting effects of living in Vietnam, where processed foods were nearly impossible to find and

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whose happiness?

Sitting side by side in the back of the taxi, we are heading back from Sam Son. I know I don’t have enough money in my purse and already it’s taken several phone calls, undercooked chicken and a sunburn to get us this far. The are exhausted but not asleep. I stare out the window

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synopsizing is hard

So I’ve spent two days trying to coalesce the major events and themes of my book into a readable synopsis and still I’m so unhappy with it. There are bits that I think are good, but things that I know are not quite right and it’s killing me. There are so many bits and pieces

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memoir/memories

Writing this book constantly gives me moments to relive and every time that a memory hits me particularly hard, it surprises me. Today I wrote about saying goodbye to a fellow volunteer and more so about having to watch as my daughter suffered the pain of having to say goodbye forever to someone she’d truly

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pacifying the soul

I don’t know what reminded me of them, but for some reason the band This Mortal Coil came to mind today and I couldn’t shake it. I missed their album Filigree and Shadow so much I actually bought it. Then I sat there for the next hour, bathing in it, drowning at times, and wondering

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