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

Gary feeding me the wedding cake at our wedding. 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 …

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 …