Things I will miss…

…when I move from the present house, not when I leave this life.  Although I suppose that applies, too. The house I’ve lived in for 15 years is very rural, with live oak and redwood in all directions.  Since no dogs have lived here for all that time, and since the fines for allowing dogs…

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Moving, house

In 1997, which my fingers tell me was 15 years ago, I moved house.  I was then part of a family with two adults and a pair of high-school aged kids, and part of the reason we came here was the room. There’s now me.  And the family center has shifted to the northern end…

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Dance of sun and moon

This is what the side of my house generally looks like when the sun is low in the sky, the light coming through the oak leaves: And here is what the wall looked like tonight, as the moon slipped in front of the sun, turning the circles of light to arcs:

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Other duties

This week’s post on writing was superseded by grandmaternal duties.  Meet the newest pirate in the King’s realm.  Arrrgh! grandson.

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Moving on

As of today, I no longer own a house in England.  And I’m surprised to find how disturbing that is. This was my husband’s house, which he and his first wife bought in 1967 when he got a job in California, and she wanted a place in England for when their children were on holiday…

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A gem among men

Sometimes with family, you really luck out.  True, sometimes family saddles you with serial killers and moustachioed aunts with lethal halitosis, but sometimes, that sprawling entity known as family presents you with a gift. One of my husband’s granddaughters brought an extraordinary man into our family.  I mean, we all knew he was a great…

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Flowers for Christmas dinner

Jeezie Louisie, I look up from digging myself out from under a pile of papers and computer tasks and find that in nine days we’ll be sitting down to the traditional pumpkin pie breakfast with a heap of wrappings burying the carpet.  How the hell did that happen?  What happened to the memo cancelling November?…

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People of the Book

When I heard the news from Fort Hood last Thursday, my heart sank.  Not only because of the terror and grief visited on this community of soldiers, but because of the undeniably Muslim name of the man accused. When a man with an “American” name (ie, Germanic or Irish or Polish or Italian or Spanish…

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Seders and other riotous entertainment

I went to a seder on Wednesday with my new family—the family my daughter married into—and found it…unlike other seders I’d been to. Sing to the tune of “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”: Just a tad of haroset helps the bitter herbs go down, The bitter herbs go down, the…

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