IT’S A GOOD THING I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, because I’d have already bombed it: my pledge (to myself) to blog once a month in 2024. Alas, here we are almost to Valentine’s Day and I’m just getting to my Book Oscars for 2023. In my defense, I have to [...]
IT’S A FEW DAYS after Christmas and I have seen (almost) all my dear ones, opened all the lovely presents, and eaten all the delicious food I can hold. And once again, thinking of all the gifts 2023 held for me, I find myself filled with gratitude. In April, I wrote about [...]
THE PACE OF CHANGE in our world has been dizzying of late and, as I often do when I feel unmoored, I’ve been taking comfort in seasonal rituals. There’s something that feels so right about tuning into the divine rhythms of the seasons, the ones set in place to remind us as humans [...]
THE EXCEPTIONALLY LOVELY SUMMER we enjoyed in the Northwest this year gave way to fall right on schedule last Saturday, almost as though a switch had been flipped. The rain began—it’s still raining—and I’m in my usual nostalgic autumnal mood, mourning the warmth and beauty of summer in the garden at the [...]
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 [...]
ONE YEAR AND ONE WEEK ago, my lifelong dream of being a published author finally came true! My debut novel, The Walled Garden, entered the world, kicking off an amazing year of opportunities and encounters I could never have imagined. I want to highlight some of them here, and to say thank [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
“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 [...]