Musings Archives - Nancy Flynn

Nothing to Celebrate Today…

Nancy Flynn July 4, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, History Lessons, Musings, Political News, Writing

After this shameful week in the United States Senate, later in the House of Representatives, and today when Felon 47 takes out his Sharpie and scrawls his illegible nonsense on a bill that should never have been sanctioned let alone. Instead, give a listen to a reading of this scathing speech by the Honorable Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” as orated by his descendants. Douglass delivered this speech to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. So much of what he speaks to is tragically still relevant today…

What’s In a Word?

Nancy Flynn June 29, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Art Exhibit, Musings, Neighborhood, Writing

There are a series of language lessons on a fence a few blocks from our house. Take a bunch of critters, mount them in tiny dioramas on a wooden fence and add their names in three languages—Chinook, English, and Spanish. What do you have? A cross-cultural language lesson and an art installation all in one. And one that acknowledges the folks who lived on this land before us and, frankly, to whom it rightfully belongs. Before I quit Facebook …

All That Remains in the Light

Nancy Flynn April 25, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, Musings, Writing

Spring with all of its blooming and blossoming is a good time of year to learn how to see the world anew again. About a month ago, I had cataracts removed from both of my eyes. Since then, I not only have extraordinary distance vision for the first time almost sixty years but the world seems somehow brighter than ever. Throughout the day, I find myself startled…

Buy Nothing Day

Nancy Flynn March 1, 2025History Lessons, Musings, Political News, Writing

Today no money changed hands as far as I was concerned. I did not drive. I did not order anything online. I did not even patronize local businesses—that was yesterday. What did I do? Wash clothes using laundry detergent purchased many moons ago. Activated the big-gun leaf blower we inherited from my son to begin the annual ritual spring cleaning up of the mess that is our outside universe here in Western Oregon…

Friday Afternoon Landscape

Nancy Flynn January 10, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Writing

The morning started in fog. Then a slow-to-emerge sun began to take over the day so we headed to the happy place that is Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island a dozen or so miles out of town to look for a few more native licorice ferns—specifically the Polypodium glycyrrhiza ‘Rowdy Creek’ that the Cistus folks found growing on a stony cliff in the Redwood Belt right on the Curry County/Del Norte County line of Oregon/California. I have two already and they are thriving in our front yard shady garden…

Turning Away from (Anti-) Social Media…

Nancy Flynn January 8, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, History Lessons, Musings, Political News

Well, the time has finally come for me. I am done. I can no longer pretend these social media platforms are harmless, are working for the overall greater good. I can no longer engage, participate, abide even though I know these sites have been good for many communities particularly writers and artists. The latest news that the CEO of the companies under the umbrella of the (very silly) company name Meta will end its fact-checking program in favor of a community-based system to determine veracity and truth is the final straw for me…

The Promise of Spring

Nancy Flynn January 7, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, Musings

The red twig dogwood, Cornus sericea, in our backyard habitat is early to bloom this year. I have to wonder if it is because Phil, our wonderful garden helper, did his expert pruning magic with it last fall and that cleaning up somehow gave the shrub permission to gussy up and shine. Its flower start yellow then open to blooms of white. These blossoms will come to be a favorite for the wild bees living in the big leaf maple and the butterflies when they return come spring…

Tangling Up in Blue

Nancy Flynn January 3, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Neighborhood

After days of bleak—gray, cold, wet, chill, puddles, sodden earth, wet shoes, dashing quickly from car to the side door of the house between falling drops—in the continuing interregnum, the between, the still-between—blue skies emerged on a Friday afternoon, this third day of January in the preposterous, future-sounding year of 2025. Yesterday, on its half-century anniversary since being released, I listened to the Bob Dylan album, Tangled Up in Blue, one that more than a few over the years have described as his masterpiece…

The Scattering and the Shadows

Nancy Flynn December 31, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Political News, Wisdom

I took this photo a few days after the terrible, shameful outcome of the November Presidential election here in the U.S. Those were the days when it felt like I was walking around in a world I finally had to admit existed, one that I do not feel I belong to, a land of cruelty and anger, a population of the aggrieved and the inflamed. No longer was there the stable and reliable world I would prefer to inhabit; everything now felt flung apart, flung down, spent. And so many of us isolated and far far apart. It was a beautiful autumn here in Portland, Oregon. Many days were sunny even verging into warmth…

Life Going By in a Blur…

Nancy Flynn December 17, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings

It rains. It pours. The atmosphere is currently a torrent pummeling down. All the world is wet, cold, muddied, gray, puddle and flow. The sky, a wash of white—no texture, no definition, one mass of socked-in cloud. That is the general feeling these last few days of autumn as we edge to the solstice, the shorter daylight day of the year, here in the Pacific Northwest…

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