Temptation in the Apple Trees
Last week, I spent an afternoon in the old apple orchard to check out the bird nesting scene. The cows found this fascinating….
Wren Independence Day
The house wrens nesting on our yurt porch chose this morning, the 4th of July, to shoo their young ones out of the nest.
When Life Gives You Weeds…Eat ‘Em
With all the rain out over the last few weeks and the challenges of getting the summer garden in, I’ve been grateful for food that sprouts with no effort on my part. I might not want stinging nettles in my cultivated garden, but I like having a patch on a distant corner of our property. [...]
Gundruk Saves the Day
Rain. Day before last, it was relentless. We had a reprieve yesterday, and I got some planting done, but most of my garden is flooded and impossible to work. I’m already a week or two behind. In this short season, that could mean a lean year for vegetables. So when I woke at five this [...]
Shower Under the Apple Tree
People often ask me what it’s like to live in a yurt. As I wrote in an essay published in The Smoking Poet last Fall, much of the living goes on around the yurt rather than in it. And that’s as it should be with a shelter traditionally used by nomads. Take the shower. There’s [...]
Domestic Challenges, Wild Beauty
I’m ecstatic to be back on our property in Northeastern Oregon. There’s lots to do: organizing inside the yurt to make cooking and storage more convenient, building a spring box and laying pipe to get potable water into the yurt, putting in the garden. And there are many challenges: a muddy road, cars that get [...]
Save the Frogs Day 2010
Today is Save the Frogs Day. Over 2000 species are threatened with extinction….
Erratica
Last week, I started writing and sharing photos around an idea I’m tentatively calling, Rocks I Have Loved. I’m not sure where that idea is going yet. It might be a series of posts, a photo album, a sequence of poems and/or essays, or nothing. I should clarify that I use the term “rocks” loosely to refer to caves, piles or layers of rocks, canyons, mountains, mountain ranges. This week, I consider one rock I should have loved from a distance….
Rocks I Have Loved: Two Photos for Earth Day
I’ve been going through old photos to pick out some that might be appropriate for an album (or maybe a series of blog posts), tentatively entitled, “Rocks I Have Loved.” It struck me this morning how well that metaphor suits Earth Day….
From Prose to Poetry and Back
‘m sad that I’m not participating in the poem-a-day madness of National Poetry Month. That’s what pulled me into a poetry last year. I hoped to discover new ways to bring music and imagery into my prose, never thinking I’d fall in love with writing and reading poetry itself (something I’d always avoided)….
My Gaelic Name
I revised my St. Patrick’s Day post from last year and posted it at Fictionaut. A commenter there bestowed on me the Gaelic version of Elizabeth….
First Wednesday Reading at Blackbird Wineshop
On Wednesday, April 7 from 7-9 pm, I’ll be joining Peter Sears, Jackie Shannon-Hollis and Brian Christopher for a reading and wine-tasting co-hosted by Oregon Literary Review and Blackbird Wine Shop in Portland, Oregon….
Another Bovine Poem Finds a Home
The High Desert Journal has accepted another poem of mine, this time for Issue 11 of their print journal, due out in April. Although it doesn’t focus exclusively on cows, my sestina, “Now That I’ve Moved Inland,” does feature them in every stanza….
Another Poem Finds a Home
I had my first poem published in January and am proud to announce that another poem, “What the Photo Shows,” has been accepted for publication….
Memories of International Women’s Day in Nepal
Four months after I gave birth to my son in Nepal, I celebrated my very first International Women’s Day in 1988 in Gunjanagar, a village in western Chitwan District. It was also Gunjangar’s first time to organize an event for that day. I describe the scene in Sacred Threads, my ethnographic memoir-in-progress….
