AFTER A LONG, COLD winter here in the Northwest, it’s finally starting to feel like spring. There’s something about the change of seasons that makes me want to take stock of where I am now, at this moment. What do I want to focus on? What do I need to do? I [...]
SOMETIMES, NO MATTER HOW you try, life just will not resolve itself into a blogpost. It won’t cohere, it won’t follow a theme—it’s just an all-over-the-map mess. Or so it seems. True confessions: my original title for this post was Love and Romance, but it just would not come together. So, I’ve [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
AH, SPRING! THIS TIME of year, I walk around with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines beating in my head: Nothing is so beautiful as Spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush . . . Though, as a gardener, I always think that if Hopkins had [...]
“MIDWINTER SPRING IS its own season,” writes T.S. Eliot in “Little Gidding,” one of The Four Quartets. “Sempiternal, though sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time between pole and tropic.” I’ve always loved that description of “midwinter spring.” I’ve been thinking of it today because it’s the perfect midwinter spring day [...]
VALENTINE'S DAY IS just around the corner, which has me thinking warmly about things—and people—I love. But first, a brief history. Apparently, there was more than one Saint Valentine: Valentinus, from the Latin word for worthy, strong or powerful was a common name between the 2nd and 8th centuries A.D. The St. Valentine who [...]