This essay was the First Place Winner in the "Spring 2011 Essay Contest" on WritingItReal, a writer's website hosted by Sheila Bender.  (If you are an essayist or memoirist, her site is a font of good info and advice.)

Here is the editor's intro when posting it… Read full post »

             The island where I live has a colorful mix of citizens – generations of island families, left-leaning newcomers (like me), rich retirees, and erstwhile business folk trying to make a go.  I love the soup that it makes… Read full post »

 

            Tech bloggers and Facebook fanatics tell me that the Christmas letter is, like, “so over.”  A quaint, antiquated, useless custom.  Or worse yet, déclassé.  They use phrases like/… Read full post »

       

 

            This morning a friend sent me a YouTube link of a hummingbird, rescued by a man who returned it each day to the park where he found it.  After a few days, the humming/… Read full post »

 Have you ever almost married someone for the wrong reasons?  Mmm hmm.  Me too.

In the seventies I dated this guy I really liked.  And though I loved who he was, our connection wasn’t the “in love” sort of thing that I had in mind at the time. … Read full post »

  On a recent Saturday...

“Okay, take these grapes and hold them,” I bent over trying to get a clear shot of Liz without laughing so hard the picture would be blurry. (Again.) 

“Lift them up a little higher..”

We were both giggling.  “Oh.  God. … Read full post »

 

Open Salon is like a drug to me – both the reading and the writing.  It pulls me in; it opens my mind; it points at my heart and says, “Ha!  You thought you were alone?”

 

I joined because I wanted a place to put those wild ideas that come… Read full post »

 

(This is the final part of my essay about friend John Yoakam.  Part 1 is here.  Part 2 is here.)

 

In early April, John and Gary arranged for hospice after another trip to the hospital to manage pain and complications.  From the hospital, knowing he was going home to/… Read full post »

 

(This is the second part of my essay about friend John Yoakam.  Part 1 is here.)

 

In March of last year I received a note from John.  He had tried to email me, but my email had come back as undeliverable.  So he wrote a snail mail note and said/… Read full post »

This blog is way too long, clumsily written and completely self serving.  Please read it anyway so that I can feel I’ve introduced you to my friend John.  I’ll do the same for you someday when you write a similar post.  Thanks.

K.

 

   

In the mid 1990… Read full post »

 

 

 

Dear Micah,

 

            When you were small, you didn’t speak.  Or, at least you didn’t say anything we could understand.  You weren’t able to use intelligible speech until you were fi/… Read full post »

 

            Anthony Fatica is my hero.  I have learned more from him about simple compassion and love than from any spiritual or religious teacher I've ever studied.  His everyday life has humbled me more than Thich Nhat Hah/… Read full post »

 

      When my older sister was born, it was after twenty-four hours of very hard labor and my parents’ worried friend kept pacing in the waiting room and asking, “When’s that little duffer going to get here?”  So they called her Duff/… Read full post »

   

 

         I wish I’d been nicer to Anne’s sister Sally.  I wince every time I think of it and I could kick myself for my lack of charity.  I am a nurse, after all.  But an idiot.  A cruel, tho/… Read full post »

 

Image: Deborah Dewit Marchant (Used with Permission)

 

Sometimes you know something before the doctors do.  You hear that small, insistent voice inside that you’d like to ignore, but can’t seem to put away.  It was that way with my liver cancer. … Read full post »

Only a hundred? Skinny kid, overbite, English teacher, nurse writer, mother of 2  (compassionate gorgeous daughters), author of books,  lovers? – well, more than you’d guess by looking at me,  reader, knitter, have a way with getting fires started – good ones and/… Read full post »

  

 I haven't thought about praying the "Our Father," (as we used to call this in catechism class)  in years.  This morning I received an email from my daughter with this comparitive translation.  I don't speak Aramaic, and I can't vouch for the accuracy of th/…

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The journal Pediatrics just published a study that says that abstinence pledges don’t keep teenagers from having sex.  Well, duh.  Really??  Maybe they all just crossed their fingers behind their backs when they were pledging? 

The study found that:

&ldqu… Read full post »

 

1.       Excel spread sheets

2.       Doctors who want you to make an appointment to discuss your test results

3.       That book The Giving Tree (She let him CHOP HER DOWN and still the little bas/… Read full post »

  © and Sales: My Breed @ Cafepress 

            This is not about our current recession, but about a “recession year” that I spent in Seattle with my girls.  The lesson has held me through all sorts of bo/… Read full post »

 

 

     I know you have been dying to know how the Emerald City Cloggers did in the Figgy Pudding Caroling Contest in downtown Seattle.  December 5^th finally came – our big debut.  Tracy and Gina, task masters that they are, suggested we practic/… Read full post »

 

 

 

Some women, finding time on their hands after children leave home, will have the good sense to take up knitting. Or travel. Or advocacy for poverty stricken women in developing countries.  Or selling hand woven ipod covers at local farmer’s markets. Me, I took u/… Read full post »

I read with interest Dr. Amy’s take on how distasteful it is for a doc to do an abortion.   No argument there.  And m.a.h’s rebuttal.  Good points all.  But I think we have been going about this abortion debate all wrong for too many years.

Years ago I h… Read full post »

 

 

The mist rises from

The lake outside my window.

I type.  Sip coffee.

 

 

 

Rain forest walk -- I

Am suddenly still, devolved --

Like a leath’ry egg.

 

 

  

Of all the dames in

All the cities,  he had to

Turn a… Read full post »

If I'm not too late...

  Read full post »