You can choose.

To be happy, to be an optimist. Or not. To see clearly or to leave the oily smudges on your glasses. To be grateful for your good luck and proud of your hard-won successes or to complain only that it was a… Read full post »

I've just posted the next leg of this road trip on my website. It's a photo essay of the area between Santa Barbara and Morro Bay along California's Central Coast. If you'd like to see it, please click on the link below, then click "Back" on… Read full post »

someone is tossing petals in a stream

somewhere someone is standing at the foothills of their dreams

antje duvekot - "merry go round"

this last luxe night in santa barbara -

raced all day from shower to meeting

from web portal to grandson's college

to ojai and carne… Read full post »

I'm taking a road trip in real life and writing it up on my website - Adobe Soup - and would love to have you join me. With minimal equipment and not enough time, I can't repost the day's journeys both there and here, so… Read full post »

This has been making its way (again) around Facebook, and some of my pals over there put together some answers that were funny, clever, insightful, lovely or a nice combination of some or all.

It's been a little hit-and-miss on Open lately, for me at least, and since everybody/… Read full post »

It’s beginning, the last bit, the chunk of time we will measure after the clock stops. We’ll say I remember when we knew it wouldn’t be much longer. We’ll say I remember where I was sitting when I read his email, the one he sent to… Read full post »

I love the post I just put up on my website at Adobe Soup. You might like it too - but it's primarily photographs, and they look much better over there than they do here, so I'm just giving you the link instead of the dumbed-down version/… Read full post »

I was clipping husks of pomegranates off the tree last Saturday, knee deep in rosemary and bees.

The weather is whacked – 35 to 40 degree nights and 80 plus degree days, no rain since Thanksgiving. The rosemary is blooming in its proper January, but the trees… Read full post »

“Diana, do I really want to hear this?” asked Ali, my best friend of a long lifetime.

“I’m sure you don’t, but someone has to and there isn’t another soul I could admit this to without having to commit hari-kari immediately… Read full post »

“Jen wasn’t a great kisser.”

My forkful of spicy green beans stopped mid-arc between plate and mouth. I cocked my head a few degrees at Alex, sitting across the table at Hunan Home’s (that we always called Who’s Not Home throughout the decades… Read full post »

I was on the phone with my daughter Amy last September, early in my granddaughter's second-grade school year. She said, “Simone came home from school and told me they did the lockdown drill today.”

I remembered her first year there, kindergarten… Read full post »

  A couple nights ago I went to pick up a pizza just after sunset. It was cold – in the 30s – in the parking lot of the little mall where the pizza place shoulders against the post office, the bike shop and the nail salon.… Read full post »

If I had a tail, I'd be wagging it in that whap, whap sort of way that big, happy dogs do, sweeping things off the coffee table and slapping people's shins.  

The reason for all my excitement is that my website, Adobe Soup, has its first/… Read full post »

Waiting for someone you love to die, I told a writer friend last week, is one of the circles of Hell. He said, “You should write about your view from the spiral because you will never be exactly there again.”

It is a… Read full post »

The path of each life is like a rope, a thick braid that fate or luck weaves into the cosmic macrame, curling around someone else’s rope to form a knot, then angling away, eventually bumping into another strand or two or three or six, gliding along/… Read full post »

Our mother had terrible hair and not enough of it. A bad combination of fine, thin, soft and straight, she and her hairdresser bleached and rolled, ratted and pulled it into a poufy platinum ball every Friday, spraying enough lacquer on it to varnish a… Read full post »

My brother Craig was living in a rented beach house when I needed to move my tiny girl, her crib, one upholstered chair and an armload of my irresponsible ex-husband’s debt away from a marriage I had mistakenly stumbled into 25 months earlier. His… Read full post »

hey, doll - Adobe Soup 10.24.11

 one fish, two fish, red fish ... not red fish - Adobe Soup 10.25.11

 still tilting at windmills - Adobe Soup 10.26.11

 hi… Read full post »

Things began to bubble earlier this year, in the spring.  One of those times that you start leaning forward when you walk and ideas wake you up out of a dead sleep.

By then I had been writing here for almost two years under a nom and had told… Read full post »

          Many years ago, I was a 28-year-old court reporter who had never been to New York.  Heck, I’d hardly been anywhere. 

            My client (and, um, sq… Read full post »

A few weeks ago my brother and his best friends from high school came to my house the night before their 40th reunion shindig at a local hotel.

John Walker, a longtime writer on OS and the person who is the reason I first started a… Read full post »

 

 Thursday, 9.8.11

            Some guy at the power substation in Yuma, AZ flipped the wrong switch and most of the lower third of the Great State of… Read full post »

            The huge thunderheads of these September days rise over the mountains far to the east, piling up on each other, filling the dry sky, sucking every drop from my skin. This awful heat holds me down, hides me insi/… Read full post »

        The sounds of slack boat sails slapping masts and chains clanking carried on the gusty breeze from the harbor to the waiters’ bench at the Body Beautiful car wash two short blocks away. A twenty-degree respite fr… Read full post »