My mother loved birds. She studied them, fed them, followed them, and learned to whistle their intricate calls. Not only can I not whistle, but I don’t have the attention span to learn and retain everything my mother knew about birds.
But, there is no question that I love them. Especially the ones in my backyard. […]

We built the house as quickly as we could, because the children we had adopted needed bedrooms and a place to play. The neighborhood was so raw and new that there were no neighbors. But as other houses were added, and other households took roots, we were different. Not the same. Out of place. My […]

When I was in junior high, they segregated the boys and the girls for health class. We didn’t particularly care for the arrangement, because half the fun of health class was watching each other make fun of the charts of the human body. However, one morning there seemed to be a particular note of urgency […]

Friday Lunch
We bought a sandwich today, to send off the threadbare week. I needed the break more than the food, and we picked a run of the mill place to sit for awhile.There were two women — sisters, I think — and one very young little boy seated between them across the room from us. What […]

We observed the holiday for two days this year — on Sunday and Monday. Joe was able to get home for the weekend, and we all spent time in the pool and sitting around talking and eating. It was an informal, virtually unplanned, and absolutely organic period of time.
I thought about Memorial Days when my […]

I prefer small cafes and neighborhood diners to ”good” restaurants, and David knows this. So we celebrated Mother’s Day at a local place that is a short drive from where we live. It was a sunny day, and it was heating up fast.
On the bus stop in front of the cafe was an entire family, including […]

The other day, I stood in a checkout line at a department store with a pair of shoes in my hand. Across from me at the other register, two people waited their turns. One was a young man, muscular and tattooed. The other was a middle-aged woman who had cerebral palsy. She held a bright red shirt on […]

One of my only regrets is that I haven’t been able to travel more. The circumstances of my life have required me to stay for years at a time without leaving the southwest desert. I did manage to get to Great Britain and vicinity a few years ago, and I’ve gone to the Midwest too […]

I was there to look for an extra chair to pull up to the dinner table during the holidays. Although I am usually a little annoyed by people who sing mindlessly along with the recorded music playing in a store, I didn’t mind that she was singing along with the Christmas carols. Her voice was […]

I spend a lot of time in Prescott. My neighbors are few and far between, so when I get a call about an emergency, I tend to pay attention. Recently, Rebecca who lives on the next property over from me sent me an email that something terrible had happened in her chicken coop.
When I realized […]