Creative

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash (after Betsy Kahn’s Sipping Grief*) Would my sips of loss be for family photos or for our conversation gatherings in the kitchen and living…

This guy would've been 100 years old today. I sure miss him. There was no one funnier than him, or as mischievous, or as nimble with words. I once saw…

Scheherazade, fabled storyteller of Arabian Nights, under sentence of death, told stories with no endings. Endless new beginnings, night after night, kept her alive. But stories, for all of us,…

Photo by Sheila Swayze You burst from the starting gate and though I pull on the reins, I hang on for the ride, longing for 1940's snail-pace years when I…

Outside the local supermarket in my small town, Salvation Army volunteers sit beside the Red Kettle, ringing their red bells, playing recorded Christmas carols. Mostly older, they work their shift,…

[caption id="attachment_7634" align="alignleft" width="275"] Patrick Moore, center. After Sarah died, Moore married Mollie O’Connor, at right. At left is Annie Gray, later Annie Gray Shannon. Photo Courtesy Michael Shannon.[/caption] Irish-born…

It’s December, and I go to Mission Plaza to try on different lives. Inside the church, I inhale whispered prayers and notice how others do it. One woman kisses the…

One in a series of historical nuggets that local author, historian, and teacher Jim Gregory has mined from our rich, robust, and sometimes rowdy past here on the Central Coast of…

One in a series of historical nuggets that local author, historian, and teacher Jim Gregory has mined from our rich, robust, and sometimes rowdy past here on the Central Coast of…

In the moldering ruins of Holyrood Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots lived, loved, suffered, where her secretary Rizzio was murdered, in the crumbling Abbey where Mary prayed, Mendelssohn found…