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Lahaina’s Banyan Tree
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…
Read MoreThe Bag of Charcoal
More than fifty years ago, I had an unexpected meeting…
Read MoreAh, California
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…
Read MoreA Look Backward
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.
Read MoreA Great Read!
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…
Read MoreThe Banyan Tree
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…
Read MoreA Bag of Charcoal
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…
Read MoreOn Deadline
Darkness enveloped the lone gas station that stood on a rural road surrounded by open fields. I slowed down to take a better look, but I knew I had no choice. This was the only place for miles where there would be a telephone booth. I was on deadline, having just left an important school…
Read MoreLove your Enemies per Leo Tolstoy (in the time of Coronavirus?)
It is a mistake to think that there are times when you can safely address a person without love. You can work with objects without love–cutting wood, baking bricks, making iron–but you cannot work with people without love. In the same way as you cannot work with bees without being cautious, you cannot work with…
Read MoreSilent Reason
She isn’t pretty. Her face is angular in an odd way reminding you of a triangle; her stomach swollen, stretched to its limit. She looks uncomfortable, ungainly even, yet she doesn’t seem inhibited by her pregnancy, climbing about as she does, nimbly moving from leaf to leaf. A few weeks ago, when you spied her…
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