Rabbits ate my new roses. Bother of them. Every leaf. But the stubborn plants refused to die. They pushed out new leaves. One of them blooms. Last year a visitor asked my husband why he'd hauled a twisty drift-root up from the beach. "What are you going to do with it?" This.
Yesterday there was a march and protest in Portland. Our younger son and his wife work in the theater, which means that they are nearly always downtown on Saturdays. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is on stage at the Keller. The A.P. reported: "Flag-waving members of the Proud Boys and Three Percenters militia group began [...]
Making choices is exhausting. It is rewarding. It is power but also wearing. Like many things that matter, the creative process pays and pains. Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me contains an essay about Virginia Woolf and uncertainty. The truth about wandering in the dark. In a journal entry of 1915 she wrote: "The [...]
Literary Hub has an article up: "The 50 Best One-Star Reviews of Lolita." The first time I tried to read Lolita, I did not get past in the first pages. I went to Amazon and read all 147 reviews, which gives you an idea of how long ago that was. I found they fell into [...]
The second blue quilt was meant to be simple. I set specific, easy guidelines in order to piece it quickly and with a minimum of fuss. It's that staring process, the decision-making at every cut and sewn seam. This color or that one, this way or that, rearrange and rethink the border? It was meant [...]
In their official First Lady portraits "20th-century predecessors show a parade of cream-colored gowns, strings of pearls and periwinkle skirts. Clinton rocked a pantsuit in midnight black." As first lady, she chaired the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, pushing a proposed healthcare system some in the media dubbed "Hillarycare." That failed, but she [...]
Here are the first two lines of seven. Maybe a little bland so far? Not quite what I had in mind? Once the squares are pieced and sewn, the effort in the first two rows is inevitably tame, inevitably distant from my vision. I began sewing the paler squares, the ones I like least. sigh [...]
