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Summer Notebook 2013: It’s All Material, Sometimes.
It’s all material. If you write, you’ve heard this before. Great writing ideas flash by me everyday, but like someone caught in a flood, I see lots of stuff go by, but I’m too busy bailing to grab...
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Photo Essay: Animals Abroad
This cat on Mykonos, like so many animals I see when I travel abroad, fascinated me. I was given to think about Isabel Allende’s writings about the ubiquitous Central American dog — that medium sized,...
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Carve Out Writing Time & Guard it Like a Zealot… Until It’s Time to Make...
The title pretty much sums up my week. I worked for days, banking time to free up this last Thursday and Friday for working on the book. “Only two chapters to go. How hard could it be?” I won’t tell …...
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Morning Writing
Morning, for writers holds so much promise. It’s more than that the blank slate of the day before you representing the potential of the page. For me it’s also the energy of the promise. There is...
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“What’s a hook-up, anyway?”
Words and meanings are slippery. Crossing cultures and time, words have a way of morphing. Generational Syntactical Blunders One evening after dinner, a young man visited our household for...
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Photo Essay: Skull Valley, AZ, Graveyard
Filed under: adventure & travel, Arizona, everyday adventures, family, lifestyle, photography Tagged: AZ, black and white photography, Graveyards, Halloween, remote graveyards, Skull Valley, Spooky...
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Meteor Mornings and Motorcycle Rides
My eyes locked on the hot white streak in the sky in front of me. Saturday morning. Up before the birds, I was walking to the south. I couldn’t believe it: the streak grew into a fireball rimmed with...
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Airplane Conversations and the Geography of Heart
What is it about air travel that strips you of something of yourself? That allows you to open up with a passing stranger that otherwise wouldn’t happen? What is it? On a recent flight, I sat next to...
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St. Martin’s – Lighting the Season and Adopting Holidays
“…[a]lluding to the snows of that season, the Germans say that “St Martin comes riding on a white horse.”[1] Mid-November marks one of my favorite adopted holidays. Why adopted? My husband is German....
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Old Bottles, Time Capsules, and Going Home
Walking into the backyard this weekend, I was intrigued to see my thirteen-year-old kneeling under the grapefruit tree, digging. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m planting a time capsule,” she said....
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Waking Up to St. Nikolaus Day…Shhhh…
I have a holiday secret. A how-could-you-forget kind of bad mommy secret. This might be the first year my German friends didn’t accidentally alert me that I missed St. Nikolaus Day. “Oh, you wouldn’t...
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Writing from Found Objects
Sometimes I come home to find something foreign in my home. Usually that means my father is in town. The grandfather clock he dragged from my neighbor’s garage sale on a dolly is–less a found object...
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Follow-up On Blueprint Your Best Seller
Where did we leave off? Don’t let the Brandy snifter in the last post about Blueprinting Your Bestseller fool you. I’ve been busy… well, busy not writing. But preparing to write… . During the holidays...
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What Ever Happened to Just Dropping By?
Why has just dropping by to visit someone fallen by the wayside? Is it a generational thing? Something that my over-studious, YUPified,* helicopter-parenting,* research-before-purchasing*...
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What Handheld Devices Have Done to Family TV Viewing
TV when I was a kid was a different animal than today. Sure, it had its detractors and proponents, but what it didn’t have was 24-7 programming—anything you can imagine watching and then some—at your...
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Niagara Escarpment Flora & Fauna: from a Brief Hike on the Family Farm
Filed under: everyday adventures, photography Tagged: caterpiller, flora & fauna, Niagara Escaprment, Niagara Region, Niagara Region images, Queen Anne's Lace, sumac, teasil
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Laughing into memory: Sharing a Buffalo blizzard with my teenager & mother
Since it’s the season of blizzards, I thought it timely to repost this. My thoughts go out for the safety and fun of those hunkered down braving the Blizzard of 2015. As I hold down a house with two...
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Long Time Gone
Yowza! It’s been a while since I’ve seen the backside of these pages and–more importantly you. Since I last sat down to really share with you, I’ve been to Everest and back–with my dad. I started...
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