3:22 a.m. We'd collapsed into sheets the texture of sandpaper some few hours before, and I briefly woke. Blanca woke with me, so I stroked her head and down she dropped back to sleep and so did I.... for about three seconds until something skittered across my arm. With a shout and a leap I …
Ribbons
For several days I've been packing up our house in South Carolina, prepping for the move back home to Texas. When we married, Paul and I merged our two homes, then moved three times - this move will be our fourth move in 2 years - and there is just a lot of extraneous crap we've …
Weekend Coffee Share: Waffle House Edition
Last Saturday, Paul and I got our coffee and breakfast fix at that bastion of 'Murican greatness, the Waffle House. I can't help sharing it with you, and hope you might come to know and love it as we do. It's not fancy. It's definitely not elegant, and you have to be in the American …
Weekend Coffee Share: Mesquite and Salsa Edition
If we were having coffee, I'd probably be going back and forth between nervous chatter over my news, and wall-eyed, silent panic over everything it means for the immediate future. Over our first cup, I would wonder if you've grown up hearing this expression, "Careful what you ask for, you just may get it," the …
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Weekend Coffee Share: Cowpens Edition
If we were having coffee, it would be an afternoon coffee since Paul and I just got back from a trip out to the Cowpens Revolutionary battlefield. It is said the war was fought in the North but it was here, in the South, where it was won, specifically here in South Carolina at Cowpens, …
Friday Five: Light
Julie over at RevGals asks for this Friday Five, we fill the Web with light, in photographs, poetry, scripture, or whatever else brings light to a troubled world. Ever a shutterbug, I've recently taken up actually learning photography, which is all about light: the interplay of light and shadow; compensating for the lack of it; …
Three Things Thursday: Blanca
Three Things Thursday, an exercise in gratitude, an idea stolen (with permission) from This Nerd's Life, with which we spread some Happy in a needy Universe. This time all three of my things are Blanca, as in her amazingly expressive face. Here are three photos of my Blanca, showing only a little of her …
Truth and Reconciliation
Three days after my 18th birthday, my father attempted suicide. His business had failed, he felt he had failed, and he waited until I was old enough to take charge of my, and my mother's, life. He did not succeed, thank God, but it was in the aftermath the real madness began. Unable to deal …
Arboretum Fail / Garden Win
There is an arboretum in Columbia, tucked away in the middle of a residential section and open for free every Wednesday. Except this Wednesday, when I arrived an hour after opening to find padlocks across the gates. I could only peer in at shaded, winding trails of lush vegetation I'd hoped to capture with my new …
Choosing the Birdsong
Maybe because in the wake of Orlando, I needed inspiration and so listened to David Foster Wallace's address to Kenyon College, captured in the small book, This is Water, but I've been thinking a lot about choice. All of life is a choice. I know this is not revelatory information I am dropping here; if you're …
Southern Fried Californian 