I set Tuesday as the day to go to Durham because rain was predicted and I thought a cathedral would be a better place to spend a rainy morning than tromping around Berwick on the city walls.  My interest in Durham cathedral began with Bill Bryson and was encouraged by Sue. I had read and  Read the Rest…

Here is Duart Castle. Sue had to get a private escort (practically) to get a view of the castle that wasn’t propped up with scaffolding. The castle is situated on a little promontory of land south of Craignure and overlooking the Firth of Lorne. I was excited about this castle because it figures in a  Read the Rest…

My automobile insurer has a program called Right Track, a device to help you get a discount –up to 30%– on your car insurance. It’s an app you install on your phone; using GPS, the company tracks your driving for three months. When they decide how much of a good driver discount you deserve, you  Read the Rest…

A long weekend in Berkeley was more than my first post-pandemic travel. It had been twenty five years since I had been in the Bay Area; that time was also to visit my college roommate and longest friend, Mary-Ellis. In 1997, as a response to breaking up with a boyfriend, I drove from Seattle to  Read the Rest…

Kay and I packed our identical painting kits, ones we had bought together at the Art Spot in Edmonds and 50 times the amount of food we would need or come close to eating and travelled to The Sandpiper at Pacific Beach in a driving rainstorm. It was to be three days of painting and  Read the Rest…

“The garden is a lovesome thing, God wot.” Thomas Edward Brown As I walk around my own garden in early April, I feel like I do when I unpack the Christmas tree ornaments and see my old friends: Sweet violets in the spring.  I have a lot of them this year: patches of sweetness all  Read the Rest…

Thus summer’s reading project is a continuation of what began nearly a year ago and continues without an end in sight: World War II. It began with the S.O.E. spies, broadened into the French Resistance and slopped over into the Nazis until I was reading pretty much anything about World War II except the actual  Read the Rest…

I’d heard about this woman: sexually voracious, loud mouth, obscene, headstrong, selfish, power-hungry, and immoral. I was eager to meet her. News flash: she is none of those things in my estimation. Here, word for word, is how we might expect to describe a man similar in nature to the wife of Bath: man of  Read the Rest…

In which I find in Samuel Taylor Coleridge a kindred soul. It might be his struggle with depression.  It might be his experience—so common to women—of feeling that nothing he does is respected as much as something a(nother) man does, in this case Wordsworth.  The two of them conceived of a book they called Lyrical  Read the Rest…

Two months ago a woman in Michigan named Karen Teegarden called her friend Desiree Jordan in New York.  They both wondered why women all over this country weren’t marching in the streets in response to hundreds of pieces of state legislation that many of us feel are whittling away at women’s dignity, autonomy and rights  Read the Rest…