Cookie Dough

Somehow cookie dough had become a test of her motherhood. She looked at the chocolate chip cookie dough, rife with uncooked eggs, and then at her 4 year old twins. Kelly, the bolder of the two, asked, “Can we have a bite?” and both sets of innocent brown eyes turned up to her, waiting.
She had [...]

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I never dreamed

I never dreamed I’d be a teacher. I didn’t want to do it, didn’t know anything about kids, and wasn’t sure I could even figure out things like which direction the Columbia River flowed for the basic geography lessons. But I started teaching anyway. I found I loved the kids, loved the teaching. Sometimes, I [...]

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Letter from Taos

Preface: Natalie Goldberg’s latest book is “Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir.” I just attended a workshop with her about writing memoir. It was a new style workshop for her. It was two days in length. She usually holds a week-long workshop. It was in her home town, Taos, where a [...]

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The Workshop

No time to post about the Natalie Goldberg workshop yet. We are busy doing writing practice, reading, slow walking, and sitting with our breath. I do have photos posted at Flickr from day one and day two.

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Water

Netflix brought me Water, a story about widows in India in 1938. I can’t help seeing a connection between these oppressed women and the two characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns, which I just read. Oppressed in an impossible social context, these are stories about women who won’t take any action to save themselves, but [...]

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Chicago

Living in the hills surrounded by nothing but trees was perfect for her. She needed to be alone with herself. She needed time away from the world. Once a month she drove down the mountain and bought supplies and gasoline for her generator.
The generator was her tie to the world she wanted to process and [...]

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Nice Neighborhood

“Ah,” she said, “this is a nice neighborhood.”
The realtor certainly didn’t want to disagree with that opinion, but she wondered what it meant. After all, they’d just turned the corner into the little neighborhood and she hadn’t even showed the house yet. “Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Well,” the potential buyer said, “I see [...]

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Wolves

There will be wolves. Today as part of Earth Day, there will be wolves on display at Whole Foods. Wolves are huge, awesome and powerful. We could learn a lot from the wild predators. We are predators ourselves, a fact we manage to ignore very successfully most of the time. But when you look at [...]

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Come back

Remember Shane from way back in ‘53? Sad woman begging handsome Alan Ladd to “come back, Shane.” Well, now I’m the sad woman, standing at the window watching the hummingbird feeder and crying “come back, hummers.”
The lore here in New Mexico is that the hummers arrive on Tax Day. Well April 15 came and went, [...]

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Breezy

The radio weather girl said, “sunny and breezy.” In Harry’s mind, that meant he could go without a jacket. So he did.
He drove to Mike’s. They sat around for a while talking about what to do. Finally they decided to drive up to Sandia Crest and hike. Each of them grabbed a bottle of water.
It [...]

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