Dateline July 2005—
Who was I reading recently who said life is hard enough even when you have everything going for you and your life is happy and easy?…
Travel Diary: Bronze, Blues, and Brews
Rocking steady blues at a music festival held in a park on the edge of a river in the isolated, interesting town of Joseph, Oregon, in the Wallowa Mountains, not far from the Idaho border. We are friends with the music coordinator so we have backstage passes…
Poetry: Rumi for an August Tuesday
Dateline Summer 2005— Apropos after close to three weeks of having house guests and one more planned: The Guest House This being human is a …
Coast Range Winds
Photo by Dave Croker The weather changes with the setting of the sun here, in this outpost of cloud/sky/tall tree/mud that was once the ocean …
Travel Diary: The Capital of Nowhere
From Jan Morris’s last book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere—words that speak to me, maybe help explain some of what I struggle to understand, this otherness, this search for place and identity and tribe…
Travel Diary: Back from Vancouver, B.C.
Road trip north up I-5 until it ends and is highway 99 again and dumps you easily and with charm into downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. The Vancouver International Jazz Festival was happening while we were there — free concerts in and around Granville Island…
Big Smile Sunflowers
Whoever has the job of naming new hybrids of flowers got it right with this one. How can you not grin when you know you are going to have not one but two Big Smile sunflowers vying for sun along with the chard, pole beans, heirloom tomatoes, callas, zinnas, dahlias…
(Saturday) Morning Morgantown
Joni Mitchell, vintage, the old stuff, stuff of my untoward youth, on the CD player, loud, so I can hear it over the water running in the shower I am about to take. I can sit here and think I’ve done nothing since waking but, in addition to writing in my morning pages book and on the blogs, I made and drank Illy coffee…
Hummingbird Out My Window
Photo by Paul Danese Still morning here in the Coast Range. Been up for a few hours, sipping my Illy espresso — they make a …
Longest Day of the Year…
Still daylight here in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon. In fact, I think there’s a long way to go. There was a parking lot full of cars already lined up at Bald Hill Park when I drove home an hour — I think there’s some kind of solstice celebration at the top of Bald Hill peak every year…
