Just post dawn in the burgeoning light my twelve year old daughter and I climbed the winding road up through the Koke'e mountains as our first whole day on the island of Kaua’i included plans to see the Waimea Canyon.   Our rented Jeep was the only car for miles and through/… Read full post »

I was already pregnant when I met Gregory Peck. 

Chuckanut Drive wound beautiful and clear along the Washington coast as I drove north to Bellingham on a sunny winter evening, filled with first date apprehension.  I also was nauseated and hungry, but unaware of my pregnancy, I chalked it… Read full post »

Years ago I owned a vintage clothing business. Every Friday morning I hit estate sales looking for charming pieces of pre-worn clothing I could repair, launder, and market.  With fellow entrepreneurs and wacky die-hard collectors, I waited hours in line before dawn for a snapshot of 20th century… Read full post »

Glen Smalley died on the bedroom floor of a Kansas farm house on the fifth of December, 1918.  It was a historically mild and dry Kansas winter following an exceptionally bitter and cold 1917.   A new father and a strapping, handsome man, Glen was twenty one years old.  In the sum/… Read full post »

My 1948 version of the Culinary Arts Institute’s Encyclopedic Cookbook sports a worn yellow leather cover badly in need of book tape.   A gift to me from a dear friend ten years ago this month, the book features charming graphics and plucky mid century prose.   &nb… Read full post »

I abandon my children to a completely inappropriate or unsafe situation in a recurring dream I had for many years.   Always given to vivid dreaming, I was pregnant with my first child and learned at the ultrasound I was expecting a girl when this particular version first visited me. &n… Read full post »

I purchased the antique albumin hand-tinted photograph of Mrs. Wilmarth after an August visit to the Maine seacoast.   The image depicts a woman in a Victorian era walking skirt and crisp white blouse seated on the jagged rocks along the Marginal Way—a shore-hugging footpath in Ogunqu… Read full post »

On the day the music returned, I drove myself to work as usual, steering my car into the seedy wasteland underneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  To save $9 in parking, I stepped gingerly over the broken wine bottle shards and walked the mile into downtown.  

I do not recall… Read full post »

I watched her climb on hands and knees through her overflowing back bedroom closet, digging for a special item.   “I’m cleaning things out and I want you to have these!” she declared and handed to me a beautifully tooled pair of vintage Western boots.   

W… Read full post »

Many years ago in the back yard of the first home I owned, near an old cherry tree, I buried my dog.   The spot is marked only by a small chunk of stone.

This past fall our family purchased a beautiful, big, and old crooked home with the space we… Read full post »

As my fortieth birthday approached, my grandmother gifted me a coat that I had admired since childhood. This particular coat always hung in the back hallway closet of my grandparents house, brushing the top of a long stowed-away canister Electrolux. It is a knee length,… Read full post »

My children haven't slept apart in the four years since their dad left.

They will not stop talking and arguing when it is bed time.  Several nights per week I find myself screeching from the living room, "ONE MORE TIME AND I WILL SEPARATE YOU!" And then comes… Read full post »