Writing
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Making Memories with Cookbooks
I adore cookbooks. I covet them like I do my favorite novels that have been with me over the years, timelining my experiences, my life. Although I love the ease with which I can get recipes off the internet these days, I still will always love cookbooks, the weight of them, how they feel in my hand, the amazing photography and recipes to inspire me. The stories inside them as well as the memories we make with them.
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Writing Out of the January Blues
I was in my mid twenties when I first became really interested in photography. I was teaching elementary school in East L.A. and taking classes at Cal State to get my teaching credential. In order to fill a few extra credits I signed up for a black and white photography class with my old Pentax K1000. We had different assignments each week based on themes like, light, lines, shadows, contrast, composition, so many of the themes playing off of each other. After all, you can’t have shadows without light. I loved the way light and absence of light played such a huge roll in black and white photos. I loved…
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Showing Up
What do you do when something you love that’s creative, that normally gives you energy, purpose, enjoyment, instead just drags you down? Even though it’s late summer, a gorgeous one, and the garden and farmers’ markets are bursting with fresh deliciousness, I have to admit, I’m in a cooking funk. For someone who loves to cook and loves food with a passion, this does not feel good. I even went to the library with the kids this week and checked out a bunch of cookbooks hoping to get inspired and I felt blah about all of them, just like I’m feeling blah about my kitchen and cooking these days.…
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Family Camping at Moran State Park
We took the kids camping last weekend on Orcas Island. Let me start off by saying I hate camping. Seriously, I do. I have nightmare camping memories. When I was a kid in Denver I went to Camp St. Malo for a week one summer. One of the nights we camped outside it was POURING down rain, there were at least twenty kids plus counselors in a large tent (more like a big tarp tossed over some stakes) and not only were we trying really hard to stay dry, but so were the mice who kept coming into our tent. Twenty soggy, tired, cold girl campers, their counselors and mice.…
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Memories & Coffee
My mom would have been 69 yesterday. I spent her birthday traveling home to Everett from Catawba Island, Ohio. Hard not to think about her there, surrounded by family and friends who adored her too, and surrounded by the beauty of a precious place that holds so many memories from over the years. Like all good family soap operas, some of those memories are bittersweet, but most of them are the kind of warm, happy scenes you wrap up carefully and hold close in your heart until you can return, or in case you never do. My mom loved that place. Who wouldn’t? A tiny, hidden stretch of gorgeous land…
