Tag: nature and gardening

Autumn has Arrived and with it New Challenges

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October 1, 2025


Today I am celebrating my 30th newsletter since I started writing to you in early March 2020, just before the world went on hold for the pandemic! At the time, I didn’t yet know I would soon have to cancel the regional book tour for my first book with Sunbury Press about my dad’s experiences in Europe during WWII (Keeping the Lights on for Ike), nor did I yet have a contract for either of my two subsequent memoirs that Sunbury published, one in fall of 2021 about discovering my genetic family members (Finding Sisters), and then my grief memoir in spring of 2024 (That Day And What Came After).


I have finally finished all the audio files for Finding Sisters. The original submissions were returned last month for some requested editing to meet the Audible technical standards, mostly to take out audible breaths or silences that were a few seconds too long. I don’t yet know exactly when the audiobook version will be available for sure (hopefully very soon), but I can definitely claim that I have now narrated the audiobook versions for all three of my books with Sunbury.


Richard and I continue to pursue production possibilities for Weaving Penelope in 2026 and beyond, and we remain hopeful, though there are no official announcements to be made, though keep your fingers crossed for us for the summer of 2026. We will keep trying to get a full production of our script, but ain’t neither of us gettin’ any younger!


As some of you might have noticed, I updated my author website last spring, and I hope to add more of the essays I’ve been working on before the end of this year. I sent you a sample of an essay about my delightful meadow in the last newsletter. Other topics I’ve been writing about include aging (inevitable when you get to be my age, I suppose), some past memories of experiences and relationships, my mom’s struggle with dementia, and various other topics that pique my interest. The only real through-line is that all of it really has happened in my life, though I don’t expect it will turn into a published book any time soon.


However, most of the rest of my time and energy has been taken up recently with family events (wonderful times at my nephew’s wedding!) and an unexpected new health challenge. In fact, by the time some of you read this newsletter, I will have a brand new heart valve, which I hope will bring back my sense of well being and my energy and stamina, which have been lagging considerably in the last few weeks. As you might imagine, I’ve started writing a bit about that experience as well.


Not much else to add at this point, but I hope that next time you hear from me, I will feel re-energized and have lots more to say. In the meantime, enjoy an image of my late summer meadow this year.

Spring is now officially sprung!

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April 2, 2025

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
I wonder where the birdies is.
Anonymous author


Though no one really knows for sure who or where this verse came from, many of us have heard it before, perhaps even know it by heart, though I’ve gotta say, my grass is definitely not looking like it’s gonna “riz” any time soon, though the birdies are definitely here. In fact many of them stick around for the winter, but the birds who went south are slowly coming back to the area, though my favorites, the hummingbirds, probably won’t be back until later this month or early in May. This year, we had a true winter with some serious snow for the first time in several years, and we are now heading into the roller coaster that is spring in New England. March, April, and even sometimes May, can be completely unreliable, weather wise, so there’s no telling what lies ahead of us. But the snow is gone (for now), and the sun seems to have returned every now and then, even if the wind can still be rather bitter.


I’m including a photo of the snow-covered back yard from this past February (it’s thankfully now clear of the white stuff), but I’m also including a hopeful picture of my flowering cherry tree from last April below this, which allows me to dream about how soon the blossoms and leaves might be returning to those currently nearly bare skeletons. There are buds a-plenty but nothing is unfurling just yet. Hopefully soon. Another poet once said “hope springs eternal” (Alexander Pope, 1734), and this rings true for me, especially in the spring months. Though current politics can often feel like hope has gone into hiding, there’s nothing like new leaves and flowers to raise my spirits.

When last I wrote, there were lots of things in process, so here’s the latest report on my author activities. Last week, I finally finished all the audio files for the re-recording of the Finding Sisters audiobook. It’s now being reviewed and (keeping fingers crossed for no unexpected technical glitches) will hopefully be released later this spring. I had several successful in person events about the newest book (That Day And What Came After): talking about my writing process and reading segments from the book at a local senior center, a library, and as a selected author for my regional group, Straw Dog Writers Guild. I also participated last weekend on an author’s panel about our experiences with publishing, also sponsored by Straw Dog.

In February, I was finally able to record the podcast for my latest book, which ironically went live on Valentine’s Day. I guess it was a good thing that I used the phrase “the love of my life” in the subtitle. Here is the link to the recording, for anyone who might be interested. It’s about half an hour long, and you don’t need to open an account to listen. And as long as I’m talking about the love of my life and the coming of spring, below is one of the illustrations of Skip from the book you can enjoy while you listen. He’s mixing fertilizer in our greenhouse for his copious spring veggie plantings.


The book was recently selected as one of the March 2025 winners of the International Impact Book Awards in the Grief category. There appear to have been six winners out of 60 entrants in this category, and monthly winners get to boast with a digital sticker and certificate and compete with other monthly winners for a year-end grand prize. It’s not an important award, but it’s nice to be recognized, even in small ways, now and then.

Recently, I hired a web designer to update my author website for easier navigation. I’m also in the process of having her add photo galleries for all three books and, most importantly, we’re starting to create a system of indexing my past blog entries, so my thoughts can be tracked by themes throughout the years. I hope to have the entire website re-vamp completed this spring.

In terms of theatrical adventures, Richard, my co-playwright, and I continue to pursue possible full productions for Weaving Penelope, one at a university in Georgia, where a group of faculty members is currently reviewing the script with their students in mind, and another, lower tech version in Oregon, with Richard at the helm as director. Continue to keep your fingers crossed for us.

Though there’s no definitive new book project on my publishing horizon, I continue to write, mostly short essays about my life experiences, a project I have referred to before as my Mosaic Memoir, though it will likely not be in book form. If I were a famous writer, publishers might be interested in a collated volume of my random life experiences, but I’m not. Mostly, I’m just having a great time focusing on these memories and trying to get them in shape as essays, which seems to be the non-fiction equivalent of the fiction writer’s short stories.


And, of course, I’m eagerly awaiting the return of my meadow. Who knows what this spring will bring to my little corner of western Massachusetts. Last year, foliage was between mid-shin and knee level by mid-May, with only a few flowers to speak of until later in the season. I expect it to be a bit slower this year because we had a much deeper winter than we’d been having for the few years before that. But who knows? That’s what makes meadow-watching so much fun!

The Turning of the Year; Welcoming 2025

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January 7, 2025


When last I wrote, my virtual tour was halfway complete and the holidays were looming. Now, the tour is over, the holiday season is in the rearview mirror, winter is headed our way in earnest, and spring will be arriving before you know it. When I was young, time seemed to pass ever so slowly. Now, it has a tendency to fly by!

Here’s the quick update on my “author business:”

  • The virtual tour finished in mid-October with 10 out of 10 excellent reviews for That Day And What Came After.
  • Unfortunately, the podcast recording of me talking with my publisher about the new book has been postponed yet again—this time until early February.
  • I have booked a couple of solo in-person reading events early this year in my local community (Greenfield Senior Center in January, Greenfield Public Library in March), and I’m one of twelve featured writers for the Straw Dog Writers Guild annual group presentation honoring Pioneer Valley authors whose books came out in 2024.
  • I finished the audio files for the Finding Sisters audiobook since last I wrote. However, once the files were complete, we discovered that my microphone had caused some random drop out in a number of the files, so everything will have to be re-recorded. That was a frustrating discovery, but it will give me something to work in the coming weeks, in addition to more essays for my mosaic memoir project, and will hopefully be done and released before I write again in the spring.

As far as theatre events are concerned, I served as dramaturg for my friend and fellow playwright’s new play, How to Fold a Fitted Sheet & Other Pandemic Pastimes. In December, we held three public readings and got lots of great positive feedback on the script plus some good ideas for the next revision, coming in the new year.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the hoped-for production of Weaving Penelope out in Oregon next year will not be happening after all, though we now have a solid chance for a university production in Atlanta, GA, in late 2025. Please continue to keep your fingers crossed for us. We are really proud of the script and hope to see a full production before too much longer.


On a personal note: the meadow continued to be beautiful this fall, even as it and the season waned. It was trimmed, mulched (the trimmings serve as a self-mulch for the winter months), and put to bed for the season by the end of October. For the first time in several years, we did have a white Christmas in western Massachusetts, but somehow, a couple of inches of snow isn’t quite the romantic thing one envisions in one’s dreams and wasn’t even photo-worthy, though I did have a lovely holiday celebration overall.

The election came and went, and lots will be changing on the national scene in the coming year. Though I don’t write much about politics, and I live in one of the bluest of the blue states, I will say this one thing: the arts are more important now than ever before. Keep creating, and keep the faith!

Best of luck to all in 2025 and beyond!

Editing Finished. Now Waiting on the Designers

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April 8, 2024

I had a terrific time working with my Sunbury Press editor, Sarah, and she gave me some excellent feedback on my grief memoir, That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. not least of which was giving me strokes for submitting the most polished manuscript she’d seen all year. Her other comments were also very encouraging: “I applaud the structure of the story. … It didn’t feel like I was reading a memoir; it felt like I was experiencing it. … You walk a reader through a journey that feels complete, both with at-the-moment description as well as personal reflection. This is a story that sticks with people, whether or not they’ve been in your position.”

That part of the process of getting the book ready for publication is complete, and now I’m waiting in another queue for the book designer to get to my name on her list. Crystal is incredibly creative and has designed the inner pages of both my other books with Sunbury, so she is definitely worth waiting for. Lawrence, the multi-talented company CEO, who was also my editor for Finding Sisters during the pandemic, will be designing the cover. Still no official release date, but I was just invited to sign up for an interview on Sunbury’s Book Show on their BookSpeak Network at the end of June, so it’s a good bet the book will be available this summer. I’ll be sure to keep you all posted once there is a pre-order link.

Most grief memoir covers are rather abstract, so I thought this photo might be something the designer could manipulate for a possible cover image.

As far as Weaving Penelope, the play Richard and I wrote together, two of the three possible situations I wrote about last time have turned out to be no-gos, but the third option is still alive for a possible Seattle area production in 2025 or 2026. And there’s an exciting new Oregon possibility that’s come our way recently, but there are not enough confirmed details to share. However, it’s looking probable that a production could happen there in spring or summer of 2025. So, Oregon friends, keep your fingers crossed that I’ll have a perfect opportunity for some visiting time out west early next year.

We just had a last gasp winter storm here in southern New England a few days ago that left us with 3-4 inches of snow and ice on the ground, but it’s already melted away. It won’t be long before my meadow will start showing signs of life again, and my flowering trees are all starting to develop this season’s buds. I’m in the process of writing a new essay about the process of becoming a meadow creator and caretaker.

This was last summer’s meadow. Who know what will happen this year?

The next time I write in the early summer, I hope to have a cover design to reveal and release date to share with you. And by then we might have more specific details we can share about Weaving Penelope in 2025.

Still Waiting…And Still Writing, Among Other Things

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October 4, 2023

When last I wrote in early summer, I had hoped to be deep in the editing process for the new book by this time, but things have moved more slowly than I might have liked. Unfortunately, that pace is entirely out of my control due to some staffing changes at the publisher. However, I am continuing to creep up the queue toward being assigned an editor (was #6 in early August and #3 by mid-September), so I hope to start the process by the end of this month or early in November. This means that the release of That Day, And What Came After will undoubtedly be in early spring of 2024 instead of fall/winter of 2023. Ironically, we are about to enter what I’ve called “my dark season,” which encompasses a series of sad anniversaries between Skip’s death next week…10/9/2010, hard to believe it’s been 13 years!…and the start of the winter holiday season. In addition to Skip’s death, these anniversaries include Mom’s death on 10/27/2006, and both their birthdays, 11/4 and 11/18—yes, they were both Scorpios. All this in the six weeks before Thanksgiving every year! Seems fitting that I will be revisiting this grief memoir during this period of both literal and metaphoric darkness this year. (The image below is of the crabapple tree I planted in Skip’s memory and the stone underneath it, I thought it might make a nice cover image for the book, but I’ll have to wait to see what the cover designer thinks about that idea.)

Just because I have a dark season each year doesn’t mean that life stops. In fact, as I write this Weaving Penelope, the play Richard and I worked on together for many years, and which I wrote about last year when we had a modified staged reading at Keizer Homegrown Theatre, is under active consideration for a full production at Linfield University in Oregon for their 2024-25 season. Send good vibes that our script will rise to the top as they work their way through multiple possibilities available for their active theatre program.

I didn’t do any author talks over the summer about Finding Sisters; the last events happened last spring, one in person and one on Zoom (there’s a link to that talk at the Events drop-down on this website for anyone who might be interested). I wonder if bookstore or library events are perhaps similar to theatres in the summer months, when business can be very slow at times, especially if the weather is beautiful and the event is indoors. But it might also be a reflection of my personal situation, living in a mostly rural area as I do. I suspect that if I lived in an urban area, there might be more opportunities to tell people about my books in person. One bright note on that horizon: there’s a new bookstore opening in my area soon, and I definitely intend to contact them about carrying all of my books and about me doing an event of some kind there in the near future, perhaps to do with the release of the new memoir. And I will definitely book another virtual author tour as soon as the new book is given a release date.

While only one of the women in the cover image below is my genetic sister, they are all female family members I found in my genetic genealogy search. Upper left is my birth mother’s high school photo (about a year before she had me), right is my paternal grandmother, and lower left is a deceased maternal half sister that I never got to meet.

As I wait for an editor to be assigned and creative work on the book design for That Day, And What Came After to begin, I continue to write regularly and share that writing with my wild women writers group, though I have no specific book project in mind at the moment. I’ve been playing around with a few “mosaic memoir” essays about experiences I had in the 1980s and early 1990s, which are challenging my memory for details, but I have no overarching theme or sense of structure to put these essays together in a coherent whole. Not yet. But they sure are fun to write.

So, what do I do when not writing? I read, I take zoom yoga classes and do online strength and mobility workouts with a terrific trainer, and I garden. My meadow had a very different look this year because the perennials started coming into their own, though the evening primrose did dominate quite a bit later in the season and had to be “weeded” out because it was so much taller that it masked everything else for a while. Yes, it’s possible to weed a meadow! (The image below is the meadow in early July dominated by lots and lots of black-eyed susans before the evening primrose–the taller, spikier plants at the left edge and back in this photo–took over.)

And this year, for the first time since 2019, I traveled purely for pleasure, visiting old friends who have moved to Traverse City, MI, for their retirement years. I even got a new cat, an adult male that was needing a new home, which has led to some fun photos and regular posts on Facebook. I call these updates the Feline Follies, and as the two cats get adjusted to each other, things are never boring and often quite funny. (The image below is of Katniss and Smokey, the fluffy new guy, who are enthralled by the bird action in the front yard on “Kitty TV.”)

Life is good!

No fireworks for me this 4th of July; just more waiting

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July 4, 2023

When I wrote last, I was eager to start the editing/book design process for my grief memoir that had been scheduled for the second quarter of 2023. I’m still waiting… Turns out that book sales slowed for Sunbury in the fourth quarter of 2022 enough that they decided to slow their new publications process for 2023 in response. This was disappointing, but after a long conference with the publisher (the Sunbury CEO) in May, I got what I felt was encouraging news. In addition to the general slowdown of the schedule, there had also been a clerical error where someone categorized my memoir as fiction, which moved it into a lower place than it belonged on the priority list (Sunbury publishes fewer fiction titles than non-fiction), so that had pushed me even farther back in the queue, but I’ve been assured the error has now been corrected. So, it seems likely that editing/book design might begin for me later this summer, which could still mean a 2023 release for That Day, And What Came After. (Image below is one of the memoir’s illustrations from a trip Skip and I took to Ireland to visit a friend who had rented a cottage near Dingle for a month.)

And speaking of being in the waiting mode, there’s been no action yet regarding our submission of Weaving Penelope to a university theatre department in Oregon for inclusion in their 2024-25 production season. However, that’s not a big surprise, since we submitted the script to a theatre professor (a friend of mine from graduate school) who was on sabbatical in the spring, and all the folks involved in the decision-making process are now on summer break. We expect some kind of movement in this situation in the fall semester. It helps that both Richard and I are former professors, so we understand the ups and downs of the academic calendar and know not to take the lack of feedback too seriously at this point. In other words, we’re still hopeful and not too worried. We hope to hear some good news in the fall.

I mentioned in my last newsletter that my 2019 book about my dad’s WWII experiences at AFHQ in Europe had been selected as a finalist for two of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2023 (Legacy Non-Fiction; daVinci Award for Cover Art). In May, I learned that Keeping the Lights on for Ike was the category winner for Legacy Non-Fiction! There’s no cash prize for category winners, but I did get a fancy certificate (below) that I could frame for my office wall…if I still had an office, that is. And for folks who are self-published, there are gold stickers that winners can put on their book covers. My publisher doesn’t do anything about book awards where the author has to pay an entry fee, so any publicity about the award is up to me. I sent out a press release to my local papers, but haven’t seen that any of them ever published info about the win. Still, I feel good about it.

The Hoffer Book Award judges’ had this to say about the Keeping the Lights on for Ike: “It is not your typical book about this era in history. The author gives us an intimate look into the interesting lives of two very private people. The historical documents and photos are a marvelous addition to this book.”

The letters and photos used in the creation of Keeping the Lights on for Ike are now housed in the Library of Congress as part of the Veterans’ History Project. Information can be accessed online here, or viewed in person in the American Folklife Center’s Reading Room located in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. 

This spring, I also gave two author talks about Finding Sisters, my recent book about finding my genetic family using DNA testing combined with traditional genealogy research. The first talk was an in-person event at one of the local libraries here in Montague, and it was a lovely evening: well attended and with a knowledgeable audience who asked a lots of great questions about my experiences. It was a delight to talk with people face to face for the first time in what feels like a very long time. I also gave a Zoom talk for the Tewksbury Library genealogy group. Tewksbury is a suburb of Boston, so I was glad they wanted an online presentation. If you are interested to hear that talk about the research process, with a short reading of a section from the book (about 40 minutes in length), you can do so here.

What else does an author do while she’s waiting for others to respond to her work? This author gardens!

This year was the second year for my side yard meadow project, so I was excited to see how things might be different this year than last. The first year of the planting had been dominated by annuals, added to the seed mix so there would be some visual interest while the perennials, always slower to flower from seed, got established. That first year was visually dominated by a mix of cornflower and poppies (image above), annuals that reappeared in a few places this year but not nearly in the same numbers as the first year. And there was a tough fight against mile-a-minute vine, but I think we (I had several helpers in the struggle) won that fight because there’s no evidence of the blasted plant this year.

This year, there were some other opportunistic weeds, so the challenge was to pull them out before they could get established, and for that I needed to be able to identify the plants when they were in their early stages before they flowered. Thankfully, there are phone apps I could use to help with that, so I did some spot weeding through the spring in hopes I could just let nature take its course once the desired plants matured. Recently, a couple of the perennials have really come into their own, especially this month as the cheery yellow of the lance-leaf coreopsis and black eyed Susans take over (image above), soon to be joined by another paler yellow beauty, evening primrose.

Next time I write, I really do hope to be in the end-stages of the editing/book design process and perhaps even to have a tentative release date for That Day, And What Came After. In the meantime, enjoy your summer!