Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Neighborhood”
I suppose I have to start walking with a camera. I see all kinds of arty, interesting, kooky, surprising things whenever I walk around our neighborhood. I was coming down Emerson, the dirt-road-in-the-city blocks and had just returned to asphalt. There on the corner between NE 29th and NE 30th sat a small tin bucket filled with narrow fabric straps…
It’s nearly nine p.m., a July summer night. I’m sitting out in our garden on one of the new chairs that go with the new table where four can comfortably sit, even eat—en plein air entertaining finally and at long last. It’s actually quite nice to have a large enough table. I put hydrangea in a vase in the center and even with my sunset clutter—telephone, two magazines, a glass of white wine—there’s still plenty of room to breathe. Even my pink and orange oilcloth from Corvallis days fits. Maybe this will become my new summer writing room. Especially this time of day when the sun is nearly down and there’s no glare on the iBook screen
We are still a week away from the official vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the celestial equator making its way to the north. I just learned from a Duck Duck Go search that spring arrives a half-day or so earlier than usual because 2024 is a leap year. It will be dark when it finally hits, just after eight p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Unlike today, the first bright one after what felt like a forever of gray and cold and windy and wet Pacific Northwest days. Walking around, celebrating an afternoon of sun, the streets are muddy, littered with fallen branches, matted leaves along the curbs and in the storm drains—the detritus of a winter that had its moments of harsh and formidable patches, that ground me, for one, down, made me want to hide inside with book after library book…
Over the years, a number of my poems were featured at riverbabble, a literary journal that unfortunately is no longer online. riverbabble was founded in Berkeley, California in 2002 by Pandemonium Press and published twice a year—once in June, the Bloom’s Day Issue, and once in January, the Winter Solstice Issue. Every month, the Press also curated a reading series at the Spice Monkey Restaurant in Oakland, California…
There is a spectacularly bright full moon out there on this chilly, late November night. Yesterday, I cut the final dahlias blooms of the season. They were looking a little ragged after a few nights of just-around-freezing temperatures and cold wind. Then I tackled the plants with my new, awesome Felco secateurs—they made swift work of stems and stalks
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There was a frost last week in and around the Northeast Portland neighborhood where we live, a couple of miles up the hill from the Columbia River. But somehow the dahlias survived here in our micro-climate that only got to a low of 33 degrees F. I walked by other gardens where their dahlia leaves are now blackened, their unspent blooms still knobby and unopened on their stems…
And even the mottled, somewhat raggedy witch hazel leaves become a yellow luminescence against the afternoon and its celebration of sky-blue sky. A day to walk, observe, look up, celebrate the riot of color of the so many neighborhood shrubs and trees. A day to rake more fallen browning leaves, to sweep, to wait for the finches and bushtits to arrive for their before dinner dip
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In July 2021, during the ongoing days of the COVID nightmare, a group of us, under the direction of artist extraordinaire Jenny Joyce painted a mural on the side of our garage that faces the alley. I had seen and admired one a few blocks away in the alley that leads to the chickens all of us were so happy to feed during the early days of the pandemic. …
The rains have pretty much arrived here in Western Oregon. And we are in the final stages of putting most of our 400-square foot plot at the Woodlawn Community Garden to bed. Oh, there will be stuff growing over the winter like always—…
Below is a found poem that was part of a Zoom memorial service celebration for a neighbor during the isolating years of the pandemic. I created it from the amazing trove of gratitude posts my neighbor made over the years before she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer…
