AUGUST

It is the last of August, and this ending could not come too soon. It's been a memorable month. There are great things about August: my wedding anniversary, the birthday of my older son, and surely something else. In the old days, August is the month I began playing solitaire compulsively—with cards, not on the …

FOUNTAIN PEN

I began using fancy pens when I was in college as an Art major. Mostly I wrote with a 0000 stylus fountain pen—a Kon-i-noor Rapidograph. The tip of such pens is a tiny tube, thinner than a crow quill, and notorious for clogging. The 4x0 tip makes a line 0.18mm wide. I used a 3x0 …

DÖSTÄDNING

My step-grandmother's secretary desk has pride of place in our home opposite the front door. Yesterday, I began emptying this beautiful secretary, purchased in 1962 for $125. Baubles, birthday cards, baskets, and relics of childhood. Things my mother and grandmother kept, programs from Ian's early performances, and things I had forgotten completely even existed. A …

44th ANNIVERSARY

We were very young when we met and still young when we married. Lucky in that joining, as in so many things. Lucky my step-grandmother was a weaver. Lucky her second husband loved Gary. Lucky to walk off the street in Cannon Beach and get a job in a bakery. Lucky our sons were born …

BECOMING

One day my favorite design teacher, Hazel Koenig, saw me walking to a metals class in the Art Building. She stopped me to ask if I would be willing to help out at a state art education conference. That would have been about 1974. Later, she got me my first teaching job. I thought of …

SO ‘VERY DARK’

The burn ban. The pain did not begin with the cake or fire or police, but it ended with the pain in my feet. I do not believe this was all my fault, but I will worry that it was. Maybe the bad day began with the cake. I did everything right. With multiple dietary …

OWLS DREAM

And a check came for my story, "If It Were True Owls Dream." It appears in issue 5 of Liminal Stories. The illustration they chose disturbs me because in my head I see Beatrice from the other side, facing left. (Plus, this character is right-handed.) The early drafts of this story used my grandchildren's names, but those …

WEASEL TRACKS

The brown pelicans are here. We found a shed flight feather on the sand. We think we found weasel tracks in the sand. Not dog or cat or rat or raccoon. Little weasel tracks. By the time I got them with a camera, the sun was up and the tracks had begun to fall in. …

SOCIAL SECURITY

When I was a teenager, my mother was buying and selling antiques. She reported the income as coming from both herself and my dad because, having worked for the feds and before that for a college, he did not have many years in the Social Security system. In other words, he qualified for a federal …

The BLANKET

The yarn above is from the blanket I just completed. The warp was 8.5 yards, and I wove three 82.5"  lengths and then seamed them to make a blanket of 75" x 88"  including fringe. One of the lengths used weft very like the warp and the resulting fabric is warm-toned and reddish. The other …