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It is April 1st in San Diego. It is not my Black Mountain-climbing birthday yet but yesterday some west coast family friends came over for dinner and cake in honor of this week’s upcoming celebration of my increasingly unavoidable oldness. As usual…when in San Diego the view from Scott’s dining room must launch each visit. This is Mission Hills and, as you know from every one of my excessively documented visits, from… Read More
And therefore I must have a birthday. This is a hard one…so I’ve stopped writing book or blog. Stopped thinking generally. I’ve just been Marie Kondo-ing my past. This compulsion to ‘tidy up’ closets, bookshelves, desks, drawers, bins, and cupboards; to rid my life of what doesn’t ‘spark joy,’ elicit a tear, of that which no son or grandchild will want, is powerful. It has become very nearly an obsession and I’m… Read More
What better way to end the holidays than with those wild California kids. They made the Thanksgiving holiday so much fun, so full of pleasure and joy. Today it’s a rainy (seventeen snowflakes around noon) wintery day; Friday actual snow is projected but this is Albuquerque so what are the odds! Enjoy….
So many choices for Christmas trees in our Minnesota woods. We always celebrated on Christmas Eve when I was a kid. Mom made lefse and we put up the tree…cut that very day in our woods. We had ham with pineapple and sausages and sweet potatoes on top for supper. Then Mom read the story of the baby in the manger from the bible and we opened presents. When I was very… Read More
2018 has been a year of preparation—for 2019 when I join the ranks of the old-old (although that doesn’t officially happen until I cannot make it up Black Mountain). However it is year’s end and here I am—still unprepared. I’ve tried. I have really tried. Climbing up and down the side of that schooner in heavy gear and walking the 10K in the Duke City Marathon. Allotting the reading of history as… Read More
Of course Oslo, the capital of Norway and its largest city, is not perfect. No place of human habitation could be—humans being the most imperfect of all things alive. Oslo may be as close to perfect, in terms of livability, as an urban conglomerate can come however. I’ve spent a few days here and there around the city over the years and I choose to declare it perfect…with a few exceptions. Oslo… Read More
I’ve been back in Albuquerque three weeks. I didn’t sleep enough last night so, before coming to theater-sit this afternoon, a nap seemed in order. As I dozed, trying to sleep, my king-size, ever-so comfortable bed in New Mexico wanted to morph into beds at Neset, on board the Linden and the Finnmarken, in Trondheim, in Stavanger and all those other Norwegian beds—wide and narrow, hard and soft, rolling and still. Sleep… Read More
Saturday was crisp and sunny, the perfect day for a stroll along the periphery of Neset Camping, taking in the everyday landscape of the little boy Svein who would grow up to be my dad. Neset means small peninsula or outcropping in Norwegian and that describes this scenic spot of land sticking out into Byglandsfjord. Olav Neset and his ancestors have owned this land for a long time, building it into one… Read More
Tuesday Evening. Neset Camping. Have I said ‘…perfect day’ too often? At this moment I’m in a lovely cabin which is pleasantly familiar because I’ve stayed in it before (miss you, Lace) and it’s cold and windy outside on my private bit of lakeshore and warm and cozily-lit inside (as all the world should be…). Branches of the big fir tree out front are waving vigorously about and the moss-splotched boulder (where… Read More
There was that most pleasurable rainy ride from Stavanger shared in all of those raindrop photos—leading up to the best possible time in Kristiansand. My family here includes Tone, Simon, Oda and Erland. Tone is the daughter of my second-cousin, Gurine, whom I first met in 1985. I liked her so much; she and I agreed back then that if only we lived closer to each other we would become such good… Read More