I arrived home from Christmas day festivities at 11:11pm, and it was 70 degrees outside. A warm wind had been blowing for almost 24 hours, and it felt like it should be any season other than winter. Back in the ’90s, I remember appreciating warm Christmases when I’d come home from college in Michigan; something […]
I arrived home this evening to something lovely in the night air. Someone had a fire going, and its smell was drifting through the neighborhood. Church bells chimed. The streetlight was illuminating a misty haze settling in for the duration. Neighbors’ Christmas lights were on. Finally, the weather was beginning to feel the way it […]
My annual rut has arrived. I usually stumble into one at some point during the year, but “stumbling” seems to imply that there’s a sort of uneven ground that your feet happen upon, followed by some more shuffling as the soil gives way to rockiness, which gives way to a gully. This year’s rut feels like I […]
The San Gabriel Mountains as well as others here in SoCal have been dusted with their first snow of the season, and our skies have been delightfully gray the past few days. Yesterday one section of the range was in the setting sun’s vibrant amber spotlight; the air was so clear and crisp that you’d […]
“In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” More TV quotes tonight, the above courtesy of Contact. Beyond its relation to the movie, the first thing this line made me think of is my frequent feeling of sadness and disinterest in the world — thanks to […]
We put our heads together today and got creative. Literally. All of our agency’s employees were divided into teams and given a Styrofoam head to bedazzle, decorate, make gory, etc. If you’d have told me a week ago that I’d be getting my hands dirty not with front yard soil but with red food coloring (blood), cheesecloth (mummy […]
Although I prefer a rainy day to a sunny one, I will say this about sunlight: it can make even the most drab of items shine. Discarded junk takes on a heavenly aura when the sun is out. The colors found in a pile of trash make up a rainbow of history. Mother Nature takes on […]
One of the things I love most about lessons is that they can be found anywhere. The pipe fixture that the garden hose connects to in the front of the house has a leak, and since it was hidden behind a few rose bushes and other shrubbery, the leak was essentially invisible. At first, the […]
“I got a screw in my tire and my cat’s at the vet.” Sounds like it could be the opening line of a country song, no? Alas, it’s my life today. Sigh. After two new front tires on Friday, I spotted a screw last night in one of my larger rear tires. The place where […]
Fall is in the air tonight, even though it’s technically not quite here yet. My evening walk revealed familiar scents I haven’t smelled in about a year. Pot roasts and spaghetti dinners filled the neighborhoods, meals that have been hidden away since the heat of the summer months began. Someone was baking cookies — I […]
Thanky 