Category: creative
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of the New Year
– I am snug in an ocean side room near Cambria. The rain that had been slanting sideways has dwindled to little more than a drizzle, and though the sea and the sky meet in a soft, unbroken expanse the seagulls are emerging from their huddles onshore and drifting past to remind me that I…
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How Phyllis Schlafly Made Me a Feminist
During my very brief stint just out of high school as an evangelical Christian, I tried with the committed desperation of the newly converted to coax my parents to church so they too could receive the Good News Of Jesus Christ. My father was immovable. My mother, who for years had attended seven a.m. Mass…
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In the City
When Waze blandly informed us that it was twenty-five minutes to our hotel four miles away, I knew that we’d arrived. My husband and I had been talking about taking a trip to San Francisco for years – both when we lived across the bay in Marin and when we moved back southward – but…
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Mother’s Days
It is the twenty-second of April, and this will be my mother’s fourth hospitalization since the sixteenth of February, trapped in a deadly cycle of infections acquired, beaten back, acquired again. I text my brother and call Stacey, a friend of my brother’s and a private caregiver who for over two years has dedicated herself…
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The Birds and the Beasts of El Niño
Meteorologists have been promising drought-stricken California an El Niño event since sometime in 2014. That year the rising temperature of Pacific Ocean waters characteristic of the phenomenon came too little, too late to combat the Pacific “blob,” a new and puzzling region of unusually warm water and its associated high pressure system that kept storms…
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A Is For…
San Luis Obispo’s Apple Store looks like it swaggered in from Manhattan or Union Square to see the sights, then decided it liked the low-key vibe and settled down on the corner of Higuera and Morro streets to stay a while. All chrome and glass and gleaming white, it cuts an aggressively stylish figure among the earth…
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Some Random Thoughts at the End of the Year
– We haven’t had enough rain – not by a long shot – but what we’ve had has washed the oaks clean and they no longer look like treasured knick-knacks that an old, ailing lady hasn’t had the energy to dust. – The contractor who remodeled our kitchen built a snug little shed to replace…
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A Walk in the Tiny Woods
The first time I drove from Long Beach to San Luis Obispo I was in my late twenties. A college boyfriend had graduated and decamped to Cal Poly for a masters degree, and despite it being the time before smartphones and Skype shrank emotional if not physical miles, we embarked on the folly of a…
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A Primer on Persecution
Even as I type this presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz are off to Kentucky to console jailed county clerk Kim Davis in her hour of despair, yet another victim in the relentless assault on religious liberty waged by unsavory political and judicial elements in the United States. For those who haven’t been following…
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El Andaluz
Because I didn’t want to spoil the magic or be ejected from the premises, I didn’t ask why a man to whom my husband and I were complete strangers let us into the locked courtyard of El Andaluz. We had visited Santa Barbara before, even with cameras, but never with an eye to urban street shooting.…
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