I'M STILL PROCESSING ALL we saw and did on our trip to France in September, and today I’m thinking about the day we spent at Giverny, Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s famous garden. I’ve always been obsessed with seeing the beauty in everyday things, and in Monet’s work, I find that focus on [...]
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires . . . I SPENT TWO BLISSFUL DAYS in my spiritual home last month, and even though a shocking number of years (43!) has somehow gone by since my first visit to Oxford, I wrote in my journal, “Still as timelessly beautiful and moving [...]
NOW THAT I'M HOME, it’s the bread I miss most. I just got back from ten wonderful days in France—Paris, Normandy, and the Loire Valley. I took hundreds (OK, let’s be honest, more like thousands) of photos of French villages, gardens, chateaux, cafes, castles, churches, cathedrals, and of course, the Eiffel Tower. [...]
THE SWEET LAZY DAYS of late summer are suddenly upon us, and my mind is a stew of upcoming plans and things to be done. Marketing ideas for The Walled Garden, drafting scenes and figuring out the structure of The Summerhouse (working title for my new WIP!), and most of all, plans for [...]
I'M FINDING IT REALLY DIFFICULT to gather my thoughts about England, a place I’ve been in love with since I saw Mary Poppins when I was six years old. During the pandemic, when I was feeling nostalgic for all the trips I wasn’t taking, I tried to find the journal from my [...]
IT'S THE PERFECT July afternoon and my head is full of flowers. Last weekend, I went a beautiful wedding on the grounds of a local winery that evoked the French countryside. The bride and groom were married under the most gorgeous arch of fresh flowers I’ve ever seen. Roses, delphiniums, ranunculus, nigella, [...]
“SUMMER AFTERNOON—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language,” wrote Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady. It’s a perfect summer afternoon here in the Northwest—FINALLY—after the rainiest June ever, and I’m in a mood to appreciate it. Wait—I’m wrong! I just [...]
THE WAY THE WORLD HAS BEEN these last few years, it’s all too easy to find ourselves feeling whipsawed by events, not only in the broader world, but sometimes within our own personal worlds as well. I even feel whipsawed by the weather—in typical PNW summer fashion here, after being a [...]
GRAB A TALL GLASS of iced tea (or your favorite wine) and head for your lounge chair! Let’s talk about our favorite dreamy summer reads, the books we return to again and again because they give us that indefinable feeling of summer. Not too surprisingly, given my Anglophilic leanings, many of my [...]
THE LONG-AWAITED DEBUT of The Walled Garden finally arrived last Tuesday, May 17, and it was a wonderful day! To think that the book that I’ve been working on for more than 15 years was finally going out into the world to find its readers was absolutely thrilling. (And okay, I’ll admit it: [...]