I was clipping husks of pomegranates off the tree last Saturday, knee deep in rosemary and bees.

The weather is whacked – 35 to 40 degree nights and 80 plus degree days, no rain since Thanksgiving. The rosemary is blooming in its proper January, but the trees… Read full post »

“Diana, do I really want to hear this?” asked Ali, my best friend of a long lifetime.

“I’m sure you don’t, but someone has to and there isn’t another soul I could admit this to without having to commit hari-kari immediately… Read full post »

“Jen wasn’t a great kisser.”

My forkful of spicy green beans stopped mid-arc between plate and mouth. I cocked my head a few degrees at Alex, sitting across the table at Hunan Home’s (that we always called Who’s Not Home throughout the decades… Read full post »

I was on the phone with my daughter Amy last September, early in my granddaughter's second-grade school year. She said, “Simone came home from school and told me they did the lockdown drill today.”

I remembered her first year there, kindergarten… Read full post »

  A couple nights ago I went to pick up a pizza just after sunset. It was cold – in the 30s – in the parking lot of the little mall where the pizza place shoulders against the post office, the bike shop and the nail salon.… Read full post »

If I had a tail, I'd be wagging it in that whap, whap sort of way that big, happy dogs do, sweeping things off the coffee table and slapping people's shins.  

The reason for all my excitement is that my website, Adobe Soup, has its first/… Read full post »

Waiting for someone you love to die, I told a writer friend last week, is one of the circles of Hell. He said, “You should write about your view from the spiral because you will never be exactly there again.”

It is a… Read full post »

The path of each life is like a rope, a thick braid that fate or luck weaves into the cosmic macrame, curling around someone else’s rope to form a knot, then angling away, eventually bumping into another strand or two or three or six, gliding along/… Read full post »

Our mother had terrible hair and not enough of it. A bad combination of fine, thin, soft and straight, she and her hairdresser bleached and rolled, ratted and pulled it into a poufy platinum ball every Friday, spraying enough lacquer on it to varnish a… Read full post »

My brother Craig was living in a rented beach house when I needed to move my tiny girl, her crib, one upholstered chair and an armload of my irresponsible ex-husband’s debt away from a marriage I had mistakenly stumbled into 25 months earlier. His… Read full post »

hey, doll - Adobe Soup 10.24.11

 one fish, two fish, red fish ... not red fish - Adobe Soup 10.25.11

 still tilting at windmills - Adobe Soup 10.26.11

 hi… Read full post »

Things began to bubble earlier this year, in the spring.  One of those times that you start leaning forward when you walk and ideas wake you up out of a dead sleep.

By then I had been writing here for almost two years under a nom and had told… Read full post »

          Many years ago, I was a 28-year-old court reporter who had never been to New York.  Heck, I’d hardly been anywhere. 

            My client (and, um, sq… Read full post »

A few weeks ago my brother and his best friends from high school came to my house the night before their 40th reunion shindig at a local hotel.

John Walker, a longtime writer on OS and the person who is the reason I first started a… Read full post »

 

 Thursday, 9.8.11

            Some guy at the power substation in Yuma, AZ flipped the wrong switch and most of the lower third of the Great State of… Read full post »

            The huge thunderheads of these September days rise over the mountains far to the east, piling up on each other, filling the dry sky, sucking every drop from my skin. This awful heat holds me down, hides me insi/… Read full post »

        The sounds of slack boat sails slapping masts and chains clanking carried on the gusty breeze from the harbor to the waiters’ bench at the Body Beautiful car wash two short blocks away. A twenty-degree respite fr… Read full post »

       I usually write about things that make me happy, so you’re probably expecting this to be about my handsome husband or music or maybe lobster and Jarlsberg potato galettes. Instead I’m serving up sadness that will… Read full post »

            I don’t know why I decided to write this today, dammit, because I will cry if I do and my brownish-black Great Lash (not waterproof because/… Read full post »

            I love vegetables because I’ve been eating them since I can remember putting food in my mouth. My daughter loves ve/… Read full post »

       Nikki St.G., my BFF and partner-in-crime through high school, had come from Honolulu with her bitchen bathing suit, so I bought one like it from a surf shop in San Diego, only mine was sky blue with white hibiscus flowers - t… Read full post »

 … Read full post »

        I’m just an old ‘sixties rebel from Kansas City by way of Southern California, and I started writing here two years ago because this was where the Big Kids of Writing (and Poetry and Photography and Art) were blogging. The comment strings wer… Read full post »

            William H. (not Henry) Mann died in February of 1995. He would have been 72 if he’d lived until April.

            I was 45 in April of that year and my dau… Read full post »