…Suddenly, After a Mere Twenty Years… In the spring of 2004, I hit a dead end with my first novel. I’d constructed a detailed outline and drafted at least a hundred pages, but it just wasn’t working. It was a literary novel, excessively ambitious in scope yet somehow also thinly plotted. That thin plot managed to […]

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash I blog regularly. (Once a year is regular. Right?) Be that as it may, for my own record-keeping as well as for the two or three people who will read this, I present: my 2023 reading. As I’ve mentioned before, I keep a giant master spreadsheet of books I read throughout the

For my own record-keeping as much as anything else, I present: books I read in 2022! As I mention every year about this time, well okay at exactly this time, I keep a giant master spreadsheet, but I don’t tally anything up until New Year’s Day, when I come here to post about it. In

Wow I read a lot of books last year. I keep a giant master spreadsheet, see; but I don’t tally anything up until New Year’s Day, when I come here to post about it; so as the year progresses, I have only a vague idea at best of what my totals might be. In 2021,

Last year at this time, we were finishing up nearly-a-year of pandemic. So many things had been canceled, closed, postponed. We celebrated a quiet Christmas with just my mother-in-law, who was staying with us—she had basically moved in after there was a covid case in her senior community. Last year at this time, we’d been

Every time I say to myself, Self, enough blogging about the weather; surely there’s more interesting things to report on about island life!, something new happens. Like, EPIC RAIN AND FLOODING. In mid-November, we were among the lucky recipients of an “atmospheric river” storm, which dumped an extraordinary amount of rain on the island. We

Since the start of the pandemic, we haven’t left the island much. This was not a huge hardship for us; we work at home, where we are comfortably situated and have plenty of room; we love it here. It’s all good. In June, after we’d been vaccinated and things seemed to be opening up a

Early morning, a week or so ago. I’d just come downstairs, in my yoga clothes, ready for my daily strenuous yet peaceful and contemplative Ashtanga practice. Before I rolled out my mat, I glanced out the front windows at the pond, as I always do. Ripples! Oh, what kind of lovely ducks are visiting today?

Wasn’t it just summer a minute ago? I was going to go even farther and say, What happened to fall? We’ve gone straight to winter!, but that’s not quite true. Yes, I did have to pull out socks a few weeks ago. (Socks!) And just this week, on my mailbox walk, I deployed my red

Late one evening last winter, a tree fell down behind our house. It was at the edge of the back meadow, and had been ailing, though that had not yet been apparent to us. Weirdly, although that meadow is RIGHT under our bedroom window (the photo on the left was in fact taken through that