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5th annual Wine and Words–with a contest!
This will be the fifth year I’ve helped to organize a Wine and Words tasting at Winter’s Hill Estate. I’ve written here before about the fun of reading aloud, and listening to others. Back in February 2011, no less, with Tasting Notes after our first event. This year’s word flights will include fiction, poetry, translation, and–for…
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Bookbinding I
I took my first bookbinding class today. I’ve had this in the back of my mind for a long time. We used to make books in elementary school; for years, I made my parents a book every Christmas. But I started wanting a little more refinement in my bindings, a little polish to my technique.…
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Splash, smooth, silver: A thousand words in pictures
Ready for the year to turn and the light to return, I took a walk today–after the downpour, in the drizzle break between showers–and watched the full creek rushing muddy and slick through my end of town, and the raindrops poised on the rosehips and unknown (to me) berries, lone splash of color against the green…
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The Long Run
Today was my long run of the week and, being a big fan of efficiency, I thought I’d write a thoughtful little essay about the meaning or effects of the 12-mile run, or the insights arrived at thereby. But running 12 miles makes me feel accomplished and pleased with myself (yay), tired (predictable), and also…
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Mitigation
I rode along on my son’s middle school science field trip last week. Because I’m a great mom, of course, and I wanted to do my little bit for the schools before my work schedule ramped back up, and because you learn something about your kids and their lives if you spend some time seeing…
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Rebuilt wetlands: noise and surprises
The Delta Ponds are former gravel pits, strung between a freeway and a shopping mall, a band of apartments and retirement homes, a batch of car dealerships. It’s a made place, and also a natural one. Reclaimed, reconstructed. It’s an attempt to re-complicate just slightly the once braided, now restricted course of the Willamette River. …
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Your Vacation Starts Here
It’s raining today–sure sign of fall–but this was one of my favorite signs this summer: Read the sign’s two parts together, you might think the job’s so great, it’s practically a vacation. Or squint your eyes and read only one or the other. After all, a great vacation doesn’t exactly start with an understaffed hotel.…
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Layover Butterflies
Sometimes the butterfly matches its flower. Or the rest stop accommodates the traveler, opens just the right amount of space, offers tasty cookies with that watery free coffee, anticipates what might seem like nectar in the middle of a journey. This is us making the most–the best–of a 7-hour layover in Chicago, enjoying the…
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In memoriam (decedent unknown)
Unknown to me, that’s all, or only slightly known. Familiar, but not close. I expect (I hope) she was better known to others. There’s an assisted living home down the hill from us, close to the stop where I catch the bus to work. Ours is a neighborhood of hills and uneven sidewalking–sidewalks seem to…