Marshmallows on the sweet potatoes or not? Packaged dressing? Yes or No? Why is turkey so damn expensive? Pertinent questions like this are being asked in homes throughout my neighborhood. The city. State. Country, for God’s sakes. Pertinent questions about the most over-stuffed holiday of the year. It’s Thanksgiving. Ninety-four percent of people in the United States will celebrate the holiday this year. A holiday time for counting the number around the dining room table,

Wilma Withdrawal is definitely happening! After completing any major project, there’s some kind of letdown I’m thinking... It happened after completing my first book, T he Orangewoods—Seasons in the Country Artfully Lived, which was published three months into the pandemic. An extremely soft landing into a shutdown world. It happened with my second, After Goya—A Mature-ish Fairytale . With this one, the letdown lingers with me regretting at times that I hadn’t writte

La Familia, Gail Roberts, 2005 My gleaming new washing machine and dryer, so white they’re almost fluorescent, stand side by side in the...

Usually at this time of year, I am musing about the arrival of fall... Last year, I wrote about autumn and art.** Several years ago, I...

“There are certain shades of blue that make me ache.” In her recent newsletter, this one titled “Shades of Blue (and Something New),”...

There’s a new gathering spot—some might call it a watering hole— that you might not have heard of in Banker’s Hill , my neighborhood in...

Bill Murray Sighting in Bankers Hill, California Actually, there is no Bill Murray and me. But, in my mind, there’s a Me and Bill Murray....

Since the moment close to two decades ago when I first opened the slender, rectangular white box—minimalist and elegant in...

Art by Boltax Yesterday, I totally wasted the day. Amazingly, it felt good. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to work a to-do...

At last. A bona fide perk of old age. At least for us elders in California. Scarcely able to believe what I was seeing in the San Diego...

As the holiday approached, I found myself looking back to the past years’ Labor Days and came across something I wrote seven years ago....

In my small circle, July brought forth three baby boys and one very large cucumber. I had nothing to do with birthing the young boys; I...

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer...

When I die, I hope it’s peony season and my children place full lush blossoms everywhere when they celebrate. Not that I’ve died, but the...

Once up a time, I wrote a book. The inspiration for my first book was a poem—“Invitation to a Voyage”—by Charles Baudelaire, one of the...

Harvest time. Not fruits of my bygone Camelot, Lush wine grapes Juicy oranges. Instead, the modest kumquat Is sought From my hillside...

Never paid much attention to Galentine’s Day, although I adored Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope character on Parks and Recreation. Galentine’s...

Indulging in one final guilty pleasure before beginning the trials of New-Year’s-Resolutions-eating, I opened the small brown bag...

Somehow with the time change, it seems the shadows are longer. “Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own...

Connie and I sat next to each other, both with coffee in hand, just before the workshop on writing articles for magazines started at ten...