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The Best Spicy Grilled Chicken
I realize we celebrated an important holiday this past weekend, that amazing thing called Independence Day, but if you live in the Pacific Northwest, second maybe to Independence Day, is summer, our summer, which we joke doesn’t begin until after July 5th. So many, many years it’s no joke. Cold, rainy springs bleed into cloudy, rainy June-uary; both feel neverending. And that’s often after an entire winter of ceaseless rain. Even today as I write this, it’s 60 degrees and raining outside. When July arrives, it’s like we can breathe. We grab onto summer and wring every single drop out of it as it stretches before us, warm and dry…
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Preserving A Story
I stood in my steamy kitchen surrounded by glass jars, newly clean and hot from the dishwasher, a huge cauldron-sized pot of boiling water on the stove, and next to it a large saucepan of homemade jam ready for canning. It was about 104º outside on a late July day and it boiled hotter than that inside my non-air-conditioned kitchen, like a sauna, the sweat sticking to my skin. But somehow I didn’t mind at all as the aroma of hot sugary berries bloomed throughout the entire kitchen. It was the first time I’d ever canned or preserved anything and I was both slightly nervous and absolutely excited, like a…
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Flourless Lemon Almond Cake
Some days life calls for cake. For a birthday, a graduation, a special date night, or even if your toilet is in your bathtub, which is where ours is right now because we’re replacing the bathroom floor. Having the one full bathroom ripped apart with a family of four is a little goofy, that’s for sure. So what am I doing? Baking, because the next thing we rip up will be the kitchen floor. Oh the joys of old houses. I love them, but I’m weary of the many disasters one often uncovers when they start to dig under layers to redo things. The bathroom is out of order, boxes of…
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Missing Our Moms
My mom’s been nudging me from all over the universe this week. I miss her so much. Especially, well, especially all the time. But this time of year really gets me, as Mother’s Day approaches. I know I write about her often; she was such a precious, important person in my life. In “My Mother’s Last Days” from herviewfromhome.com, Amber Shoemaker says about her mother, “I hope she knows she was one of the great loves of my life.” Yes, I thought, this is exactly how I feel about my mom. I think about my mom daily, intentionally, but every once in a while tiny, specific glimpses of memory come…
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Writing vs. Gardening, the Battle Begins
Every day is a battle in the garden. A battle for survival, weather vs. plants, Dizzy and Jasper vs. plants, critters vs. plants. For me, finding, or rather, making time to write is also a battle. When both my kids started back to school for the whole day this past fall, I took advantage. I’ve been writing almost every weekday for three to four hours a day. What a difference that kind of writing time does for my writing, rather than the tiny increments I attempted to steal, once in a while, with the kids at home. A regular routine of writing practice several hours a day, five days a week.…
