Three of us worked the thousand-piece Paris scene puzzle over a period of ninety days, completing it just before the deadline I had set of the spring forward  daylight savings time change. Time to live outside. Two very senior seniors and one extremely hip and cosmopolitan thirty something. My latest puzzle fascination began at a spacious lake house in Michigan last summer—a Big Chill  version of Friends . Six of us, usually with a cup of coffee, a beer, or a glass of wine in

Red Pancake Plant (Kalanchoe Thyrsiflora), 2012 Spring arrived recently, and my favorite place became the garden. San Diego’s sure-fire and steadfast sunshiny springtime weather ended the indoor fireplace season. I am a gardener. My maiden name is Gardner which primarily comes from an English occupational surname for “keeper of the garden.” I am that, but also a lover of plants, the life and death cycle so clearly illustrated in gardening, more each year of my adult life. I’v

Ode to Programmable Timers Like the first rise of the conductor’s baton in the hushed concert hall, there is a moment when my home is filled not with music—with light. Thank you, programmable timers. The light began when, as a recent widow, I moved into 215, my new home just as the time changed, my days falling into autumn darkness—the deepest darkest cover of loneliness late afternoon through the never-ending space until bedtime. Soon, I ventured to Ace Hardware and returned

New Year’s resolution, 2006, number seven? Learn something new. I It has taken me a few weeks to get my mojo going, and amazingly I am learning not one, but two new things. The first, a surprise even to myself, I am studying meteorology. Starting simple with a Great Courses program taught by a UCLA professor. I say simple, but it’s turning out to be as difficult as learning a new language. But fascinating! According to the bespectacled professor, Nature Abhors Extremes . Som

Stack Packs for my Writing Group Cash at 5 in his great-grandfather's football sweater “My grandmother invented the Stack Pack,” five-year-old Cash boasted vehemently to his six-year-old sister with the pride reserved for a Nobel prize winner recently recognized for discovering a cure for a deadly disease. The Stack Pack—gifts assembled one atop another—minimum three—then wrapped with gaily decorated paper, anchored together with hidden tape between each and tied with a color

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...