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Nearly sixty years ago, with great excitement, my husband and I planned a trip to Death Valley National Park to see its wondrous sights—the colorful clay and mudstone badlands, the vast salt flats and treacherous canyons, the stark, windblown sand dunes. On our way to Death Valley from Los Angeles, we passed large groups of…

Since breakfast at the hotel seemed exorbitant, we walked across the street to Lorie’s Diner—a retro-type restaurant with the hood of a 1950s car sticking out of one of the walls. The café sported a long counter, waiters and waitresses dressed in garb like the 50’s, each wearing a red soda jerk paper-pointed hat and…

Visiting San Francisco has always brought up comparisons in my mind with Los Angeles, where I grew up. It felt richer in history, which, of course, it is. Every time I visited SF, I detected a vibe that was different from my hometown: There seemed to be a heartbeat in the Fog City missing in…

Note: I wrote this essay in 2020, many years after visiting it in 1980. It has always stayed in my memory of Lahaina. Because of the terrible tragedy that Lahaina recently suffered with a devastating fire, this beautiful monarch is one of the many victims. Now tree surgeons from around the Hawaiian Islands are trying…

More than fifty years ago, I had an unexpected meeting...

Recently, I returned to my home state because I missed the Pacific Ocean. Oh, yes, I do love northern Arizona with its red rocks and its prickly pear cactus and mesquites, but California was calling. And this is what I inhaled… Greenery everywhere, filling my senses Camellias blooming     Azaleas flaunting Bird of Paradise displaying Coral…