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 [...]
IT'S JANUARY, AND if there’s a better month for snuggling inside with a good book and a cup of tea, I don’t know what it is! I’ve recently been inspired to think about my favorite books of last year in terms of Oscar award categories by the fabulous Elsie @ Tea and [...]
AS CHRISTMAS CREEPS EVER CLOSER on its little cat feet, I’ve been thinking back over 2022, and I find myself filled with gratitude. So many wonderful things happened to me this year, and after several really tough years, I think it’s worth celebrating them. The most exciting thing for me, of course, [...]
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 [...]
THOUGH T.S. ELIOT FAMOUSLY wrote in The Wasteland that “April is the cruellest month,” when April finally rolls around here in the Northwest with its changeable weather and long-awaited flowers, I’m usually looking for a slightly more hopeful take on it. I’ve written before about my joy in seasonal reading and, this time [...]
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 [...]