THERE’S AN IMAGE from one of those summer boat trips we took with my friend Becky and her family when our kids were young that always haunts me this time of year. Orcas Island, late August, walking along a lane above the water. (Somebody was probably complaining their feet hurt.) But what [...]
In summer the song sings itself. William Carlos Williams IT’S FINALLY SUMMER with a vengeance here in the Pacific Northwest after a dark, drippy June. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t post last month because it would have just been another rant about the weather! True to form, summer arrived here [...]
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date . . . This summer has gone by so quickly! I was so deeply caught up in it that I didn’t manage to put together a post in July, and now I’m suddenly looking at the last days of August. Lots of lovely [...]
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 [...]