Oh, it has been a long time since I last posted—my apologies to regular readers who were hoping for a little more blogging between the end of April and the beginning of June. I had to take time out to host another wonderful May Day party, my 20th year of doing so in Sonoma County, [...]
Talking with my good friend Dawn on the phone last week, I asked how everything was going. She hesitated, then said, “Well, it’s the new normal.” I understood exactly what she meant. Everyone with a job was still employed. No one previously healthy had been diagnosed with anything. Our friends were carrying on, the children [...]
I have been having a wonderful holiday, with my daughters around me and the house full of colored lights. Last weekend we gathered with so many friends in San Francisco and celebrated the Solstice in style. Two days later Jojo turned 16, the next night my family came up for a lovely Christmas Eve dinner, [...]
Friday I went to the opening night of my daughter’s high school play. They were performing The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s brilliant play about the witchcraft hysteria of 1692 in Massachusetts colony. There she was in the opening prologue, dancing and singing with friends in the woods like any good Pagan child. There she was a [...]
Like so many others, I have been glued to the screen over the past few weeks. Debates, opinions, news of the economic collapse, cowpies from the election trail—it is all so important, and so crazy, that I consider it a survival skill to understand what is going on as best I can. Along with this, [...]
This weekend is, or has been, the equinox. I usually love the equinox. My old circle had a wonderful group journey we took every Spring and Fall, because the balance of the seasons enabled us to go farther along this one road between the worlds than we were normally able to. I savored the feeling [...]
I remember one summer day when I was about 12 years old, walking home from the closest store to our house. It was a two mile walk along the hot, dusty ridge trail that wound like a ribbon of young pines and dry grasses between the north and south lanes of Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. [...]
I live in one of the few places in Sonoma County where there is a shred of freshness in the air today. The wind is blowing fierce, the sky is like a milky soup with streaks of rust from all the fires burning, but at least here the smoke mingles with a layer of fog [...]
There are other places much more suited to outdoor celebrations of May Day than the Northern California coast. Our weather is dicey at best in the spring, often accompanied by cold winds that whip in from the ocean. It would make much more sense to celebrate Beltane here in September or October, when the wind [...]
Now that more than a week has passed since my birthday, I believe I can give up my handy chocolate cake rationale. This is the rule that in the two-week period surrounding one’s birthday, any meal is best celebrated with a slice of chocolate cake. Otherwise, the terrorists have already won.
The weekend before my birthday I headed down to Santa Cruz. On the way, I had a delicious chocolate cupcake at a Peet’s in Berkeley, followed two days later by two (2!) chocolate cakes procured by my friends, who sadly couldn’t agree which bakery made the best one and so were forced to get them both.
Another two days and it was my actual birthday, which I celebrated by having my lovely niece and her boyfriend over to join Jojo and me for dinner, followed of course by a chocolate cake. Two days after that, the leftovers were finished and Jojo and I resumed our normal sugar-deprived existence. The memories of a birthday well-celebrated, we felt, would last us at least to May Day, if not Mother’s Day.
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