Window Thinking
One day, Little Sal went with her mother to Blueberry Hill to pick blueberries….. One day, the Searls boys went with their parents to Arctic Valley to pick blueberries….. We hiked here as a family last September and made plans to return during blueberry season. This is that season! I’ve heard that people hold their favorite berry patches close and don’t share their secrets …
Sitting in my chair by the window this morning, I was thinking about my September calendar and only half attending as I read aloud to the boys. Blue sky + white puffy clouds + sunshine replaced yesterday’s cold rain in my window view as my eyes ran fast across the words on the page in front of me. We’ve been …
Last week I finally updated my 2014 Reading List here. It’s so hard for me to make a favorites list because I read books for a variety of reasons and so I’ve got a lot of different angles to evaluate. This is the first year I’ve noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time reading books that I haven’t bothered to …
With 3.23 inches of rain this past month we made #10 in the list of Anchorage’s top 10 wettest Julys on record. (Average = 1.83 inches) We ate soup for dinner Monday night. It wasn’t our first soup dinner this month. David talked about how cold it was working out in the field as it poured down rain …
The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colors, lights, and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts. This. Quoted from an old gravestone in Cumberland, England, and used as the final text in Frank C. Craighead, Jr’s book For Everything There Is A Season: The …
Surgery is surgery is surgery is surgery. That is, the word itself lays bare its associations, its attendant emotions and connotations. It is what it is. Risk. Difficulty. Vulnerability. Attendant Pain. A Body Altered. The only relevant question is whether the surgery heals or merely disfigures the body – Lynne Greenburg, The Body Broken: A Memoir …
This morning I read this article: Half the World Menstruates. Now, Let’s Talk About It and I want to talk about it. A few days ago I opened the bathroom cupboard to grab a new roll of toilet paper and saw this: I flew to Oregon two+ months ago for a complete hysterectomy. Just back home last week, …
After turning in my best reading year ever, it felt like 2014 got off to a really slow start. At the end of the first week I had only completed one book and it was a Little House on the Prairie read aloud I’d started with the boys in December! David enjoyed the lead and …
This NYT article The Art of Presence came through my twitter feed today and the headline stopped me. As I read the article I flooded with memories and resonance. Do be there. Don’t compare, ever. Do bring soup. Do not say “you’ll get over it.” Do be a builder. Don’t say it’s all for the …
2013 was an amazing year of reading for me. I read 121 books; 94 authors. On New Year’s Eve my sisters, who read stacks of books themselves, asked for an infographic of my list and no doubt that would have been easier to read than this rambling and rather random review….. Genre: 18 Memoirs 75 books fiction/historical fiction …
Thanksgiving landed on the calendar quite late this year. Today marked the final day of the Thanksgiving holiday even as it also marked the first Sunday in Advent. I was born the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, nearly a month too early. My lungs were not ready so I spent my first days in an incubator connected …
Gorgeous fall colors, mild temperatures (low 50s) and the promise of clouds opening to sun rather than rain inspired our family out for a hike yesterday. I’ve been frustrated with my seemingly slow recovery from endometriosis surgery, but it’s been a month now and I was ready for this challenge. We could have gone any …
I think I discovered Byrd Baylor’s books when I was teaching a 4th grade geology unit. From Everybody Needs A Rock: Everybody needs a rock. I’m sorry for kids who don’t have a rock for a friend. I’m sorry for kids who only have tricycles bicycles horses elephants goldfish three-room playhouses fire engines wind-up dragons …
Mid June – July is littered with markers for events that have changed my life. On June 19, David and I celebrated 15 years of marriage. This is what I worked on, but unfinished, I never posted: It was an awkward love, Ours. Victims of small-town matchmaking drawn together by a mysterious Love that would not …
So I like to read. A lot. In eager anticipation of her visit to Loussac Library tomorrow I’ve been reading Linda Sue Park’s books to my boys and last week in Keeping Score I read this description: The library at Grand Army Plaza was one of Maggie’s favorite places. mom had taken her there ever …
I read Anne Lamott’s latest book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers during a stretch of gorgeous March weather. The days here in Anchorage were getting longer, the sky was blue and the sun was shining. One afternoon Ethan and I even squeezed fresh lemonade and set it outside to chill. There were still …
Country Road take me home, to the place I belong….. John Denver In April we flew to Oregon and spent 2+ weeks fully immersed in an unusually warm and absolutely glorious Oregon spring. We left piles of Alaska snow and a string of days stretched backward to months spanning a very long, white and cold winter. …
The other day I watched through the window as an older lady and her caregiver navigated the narrow path of dry, bare pavement that etched its way through our snowy, ice-packed street. The older lady was using a walker to aid her steps and all of the sudden I remembered: This picture was taken the …
Ethan and I were in the hospital the morning after his birth when the doctor on call for our family practice clinic came to check on him. I was surprised to see this doctor because he did not practice in our clinic, but at a clinic in a nearby town. He’s a long time family …
I had a bunch of broken ribs when I was pregnant with Ethan. I have no memory of the car accident that broke the ribs, but I remember the first trimester + broken ribs. I found out I was pregnant the day before the accident. After a long, hot June Saturday tromping through central Oregon …
The word home summons up a place….that you have rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you feel you belong and that in some sense belongs to you, a place where you feel that all is somehow ultimately …
My favorite lines in The Hobbit come at the very beginning of the story when Gandalf seeks out Bilbo and asks him to join him on an adventure: I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone. I should think so–in these parts! …
I think we lose sight of the beauty, the most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath. You know, the moments I look back in my life, and think, those were the moments that made me — were …
In the seemingly endless grey days of a typical Portland winter I struggle with seasonal affective disorder and a few winters ago I began using this lamp to help me cope. Needless to say, when we moved to Alaska I packed it with an anxious eye toward the infamous short days ahead. In the heart of our …