I enjoy most invitations – to lunches, parties, weddings. However, sometimes folks ask me to unusual gatherings, such as drumming circles (decline), meditation groups (yes), remove invasive fish species from streams (sorry, I avoid slime), hike 50 miles around a mountain (an ecstatic accept). The other day I received the strangest invitation of all: to […]

Trying to get along with people and follow social dictates – or not – has given me some funny memories. It’s hard to forget meeting Clive, my posh sister-in-law Elaine’s new boyfriend. She prepared us ahead of time by saying he was very spiritual, a trait she apparently admired. When he arrived in our home,

“We’re all nurse logs for each other” is a phrase I saw on a t-shirt recently in Seattle, Washington. Locals understood what this meant. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in a family of campers and hikers. Nurse logs were common in these forests: fallen trees that, over time, welcomed seedlings that sprouted in,

I’m not always clever enough to comprehend hidden agendas. But a recent incident whacked me over the head. My adult son lived in a different city, and I loved visiting him.  He often took me out with his friends for coffee, drinks, or a party. I enjoyed hanging out with his social group; this didn’t

Jane and Joe, who lived in Los Angeles, loved to throw a big Halloween party every year. Although I’d moved away, I found myself back in the City of Angels on Halloween and they insisted I come. Then I remembered Lowell, a college buddy of Joe’s. “Oh dear, I really don’t want to see Lowell.

I never imagined my cousin, Lucy, would become a ghost. To my mind, ghosts were troubled souls, but Lucy cast a lively yet gentle light with her ukulele always at hand, ready to strike up a song. In my precarious childhood, Lucy and her husband, Kenji, were my legal guardians, my safety net. They gave

As I entered the radiation room at Queens Hospital for the first time, I shivered. More than a dozen people waited for their cancer tumors to get zapped. Reluctantly, I joined their ranks. I felt shy and scared. Once I sat down and I glanced around, it amazed me to see the wide variety of

For over seven hours on an airline flight, I felt skinny and small. It was such a novel sensation, I almost giggled with delight throughout the trip. At 5 feet 8 inches tall, I have maintained a normal weight which, over the decades, varied from the heavy to the light end of that range. In

When a face peered in from outside my 28th floor condo window, my stomach leaped up to my throat. To my horror, the head, unattached, floated up, beyond my sight. I had entered a Stephen King world. After a moment, I realized that the “head” might have been a crinkled piece of brown paper, about

According to my mother, I grew up in a haunted house. She located the ghost, specifically, in the attic. One hundred years old, our home looked like a roomy old farmhouse and stood in a semi-rural suburb of Seattle. The upstairs area had two bedrooms, one bath and a cozy den, unfinished with bare beams.