Blog

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…

Maybe it was my training as a newspaper reporter, or maybe because I had been raised by my family to watch my surroundings, but as I got out of my car, I noticed two men loitering around the men's rest room. I made a fast track to the women's bathroom and when I came out, one was still there, but the other had moved to the van.

When We Were Young and Brave by Hazel Gaynor is the kind of book that transports the reader to a a different time and place–a welcome change of scenery for those of us who are staying close to home during this pandemic. In this factual historical novel, the place is Chefoo, Shantung Province, China. and…

Lahaina Town’s monstrous one-hundred-seventy-year-old banyan tree covers a whole block across from the harbor. One can sit on a bench under the tree’s spread and see the harbor twinkling through its branches, but it’s the banyan that commands the eye, not the water. The tree’s many trunks (16) reach deep into the island’s soil wherever…

There I stood, a beauty to behold in my worn pink chenille robe, my hair rolled up in curlers, and my eight months of pregnancy bulging beyond the robe’s width. That spring evening almost fifty years ago, I was exhausted, cranky, and ready to climb into bed with my already sleeping husband, when the doorbell…