Stephanie says

I've got a leaky pipe in the laundry room.  Water on the floor alerted me - and my response was to locate the drip and catch it with a little bucket.  This was approximately a year ago.  A couple times each week I empty the bucket and think about either fixing the leak myself (because I have a lot of experience in plumbing - learned from manuals during a very dismal time in life when an outlay of cash wasn't possible.  My labor was free however.  It's not rocket science. )  Upshot, I let it go.  About two weeks ago I noticed the bucket was dry.  Hmmm.  You realize I am a very smart person so you'll follow that I reasoned the leaky pipe repaired itself, as it would, in some other world. Oddly, the other night as I was locking doors, etc., on the way to bed, standing in the laundry room, I heard a drip.  Drip, drip, drip.  I drew some conclusions about that dry bucket. The small leak wasn't so small now.   Water, being water,...

Two bone-jarring kilometers from Todas Santos over narrow beach road of washboard and sand are the final leg of the trip.  Finally here.  Here being Baja, a semi-tropical paradise of wind-capped ocean pounding up steep sandy beaches, where scrub trees and cacti dot the rising elevation from water’s edge.  Higher still and there’s the stuccoed house with deep, thatch-roofed courtyards, skirted by a green verge of banana and mango trees, asway palms at dance in the breeze, and bright bougainvillea flowers tumbling down walls in a riot of color. Now a passing whiff of plumeria.  I settle into my room: ground floor, ocean view and comfortably appointed.  The door does not have a lock.  Okay.   Ellen is at hand to meet us as we arrive.  This is the third year she’s held the writing retreat at Serendipity. Here comes Sheri: tall, blond, and thin, (they’re all thin.  Except me and Sharon, the only ones of any ...

Meandering through the busy streets of Orvietto, I admire the Italian custom of evening strolls.   It’s a small hill town dating from Etruscan times, built on tuff cliffs towering above fields and vineyards, those cliff walls an ideal defense.   Tuff is a porous stone and Orvietto is known for the caves carved out beneath the city; wine cellars sure, but also pigeon coteries in event of a siege. The pigeons provided communication, meat and eggs.   I so admire good planning.   We’d arrived mid-day by bus, delivered to the station at the bottom of the hill.   Rather than schlepping our bags, we splurged on a taxi for a thrilling ride up the cliffs, through narrow streets, the taxi whizzing along barely clearing the spaces between buildings, and certainly at the peril of any pedestrians.   A tossup between sheer terror or adrenaline – it was definitely a buzz. Orvietto was the Italy I’d come to see.   The rave is always about Sienna; I couldn...

I’m not particularly into corn.   I admit it tastes good eaten in season.    Clad in a many-leaved husk, hydrated by corn silk, and requiring careful shucking to get to the yellow starchy kernels, is only worth my while in season.   I typically eat one ear of corn-on-the-cob per year.   I’m pretty much the same with potatoes, although the potato season isn’t as clearly defined.   We don’t grow a lot of potatoes in Douglas County.   Home gardens, yes, but that’s about it.   (Now don’t be Tweeting me if I’m wrong.)     My grandfather grew three crops in his large vegetable garden:   strawberries, corn, potatoes.   He’d dig up a pail of new potatoes for Grandma to cook into a trough of creamed potatoes and peas.   I don’t know where the peas came from.   I don’t think frozen peas existed in the mid 1950s, yet I have no memory of coerced labor shelling peas.    My grandmother was not a skilled cook. ...