Another day unfolds in my city life as I reclaim my order and my time after returning from a long, icy trip back east. This is the first day I’ve actually noticed, taken note of just how long the light actually hangs around now that we’ve had almost a week of the clocks sprung ahead….
I was surprised to hear and see that it was raining tonight. OK, it’s only March and this is the Pacific Northwest. But somehow all the blooming, the bulbs up and showy, the fruit trees, the camellias and almost the rhododendrons, had convinced me that winter was over which means sun instead of rain.
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Today I finally unpacked my fountain pen collection. I also hung a dream catcher that my old boss at Cornell gave me when I left my job there in 1998. Since then, it had been hanging in my writing room window, …
It started as a single event. One day I went outside and the air in our neighborhood here in Northeast Portland was filled with the wonderful smell of baking! At first, I assumed someone in the neighborhood wasn’t as calorie-phobic as I am and had decided to make a batch of cookies or pastries or donuts. Then I smelled it a second time. And a third…
I arrived back to sane, springing-ahead Portland last night, weary from my sojourn to home turf in northeastern Pennsylvania and a pilgrimage to icy, snow-drift and dreary Ithaca for a friend’s memorial service on March 1st. It was a grueling trip. Lots of down time, time to observe the shabby, broken-down weariness of that part of the east
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I think it’s hitting me tonight—after a spate of days spent socializing and the Arctic air and sun along with the piles steadily growing, day after day, on the edges of the rooms on the first floor of the house—here we go again! I am so longing to be settled, to be home…
Arctic chill has blanketed our corner of Oregon. Winds are stirring the firs and sequoias, up from the Columbia River which isn’t that far from our house. Even around the summit of Mt. Hood, it’s so clear you can see the snow swirl….
What a whirl life has been of late! It is barely five days since we had an offer accepted on a beautiful home barely two blocks down the street from where we currently live. …
Usually we have two holiday trees. But now that we live in the Little House in the Big City, that wasn’t an option this year. Also, neither of us were in the holiday mood, for a whole host of defensible reasons. So, not long after my St. Nicholas Day birthday, …
The rhododendron’s leaves and branches in the sunlight across the back of the orange living room chair.
The crisscross lines of the window’s panes bisecting the shadow of the candlesticks with their red and yellow yet-to-be-lit candles on the butter yellow wall….
