I wake to rain. I am on my hands and worthless knees. I pry and pare back twinflower leaves, free the groundcovers: kinnick-kinnick, thimbleberry, and native wintergreen. Dig and prune. Command the dahlias to grow aligned with their bamboo stakes. My fingernails are crescents of dirt. All I care is to breathe, hidden beneath the reach and lean of these tall, tall western Oregon trees. Last night in the rain, the emperor gong rang…
Home Sweet Home
We’re back and I’m glad. To an overgrown garden, just-blooming rhododendrons, bleeding hearts and ferns along the grass out front, and jet lag to beat the band, of course. I seem to get four or five caffeine-fueled waking hours with some clarity of mind
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Travel Diary: The Rain Returns to Venice
Dateline April 2008—It’s a lazy, cloudy, rainy Tuesday here in Venice. A black skiff painted with the faces of Disney’s Seven Dwarves just sped along the Rio San Barnaba canal below our apartment windows. It sets a person wondering—what is that about?…
Off to Venezia!
We’re about to take a Radio Cab to the airport and start our long journey to Venice, Italy. This vegetable and fruit boat is just down the street — well rather, canal — from our apartment. Address is 2817 Dorsoduro,…
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…
Caesura Between Trips
I’ve been back from my trip to Northern Thailand for barely two weeks; next Monday, we leave for Kaua’i. Back in December, when I reflected on what I wanted to have happen in this, my 50th year of life, I knew some travel was in the cards.
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