• Keeping Creative Juices Juicy

    A few years back I took an acrylic painting class. Sometimes, while the ever-present radio played a Mahler violin concerto, an aria from La Traviata or Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, I would spin about whipping color on my canvas, feeling “in the zone.” My mind would disconnect from my hand, which moved independent of…

  • The Olden Days of Nursing

    “I would be in a sweat if I tried to maneuver out of that tight parking space without power steering,” I said to my 15-year-old grandson who is currently taking driver education. We had left the grocery store with a bottle of apple juice and two bags of pretzels. The parking lot was small and…

  • Luther

    I received my memoir manuscript from my editor this past week. Thankfully, she hadn’t any issues with structure. (I’m not counting the many grammatical errors she found that I thought I had addressed but still missed). Since the last version of my book, I have changed the title, dropped five chapters, deepened some others, and…

  • The Things I Treasure

    Tomorrow we are having the rooms on the second floor of our new townhouse painted. Before we moved furniture to the center of the rooms, I stored in a large cardboard box, out of harms way, the treasures I kept on the shelves of my desk. Among the various memorabilia I packed away were the…

  • PERSISTENCE

    Originally posted on Getting Older: Charting the Uncharted: In 2014, I finished my memoir. In spite of myself, I persisted and finished. Ten years ago, I left a full time nurse practitioner job and began to write in earnest. The book I just birthed is not the one I started then. It has been configured…

  • Cooking from Memories

      I have always loved to cook. Well, maybe less so lately with only two people to feed. Thankfully, my husband has begun to enjoy the heat of the kitchen. Over the years, we have collected a variety of cookbooks. Even after parting with some of them before moving to our new townhouse, we still…