By Linda Wallace

Celebrity

2009-05-14T19:33:00.001-07:00

My mother has long been famous for her carrot cake, but now her celebrity status has reached a new level. The Sedalia Democrat ran a story, “An Era and an Aura,” in April about the reopening of the J. Huston Tavern Restaurant in my home town, Arrow Rock, Missouri. The photo is by Sidney Brink. The new manager, Chef Liz Huff, convinced Mother to teach her how to make the cake. Mother was highly amused at the way Liz, a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, “threw flour all over the kitchen.” M.K.’s Arrow Rock Carrot Cake is now featured on the menu. Liz is quoted in the story as saying, “It’s the best carrot cake in the whole world…The whole universe revolves around this cake!”

Maybe seventy-five people live in Arrow Rock, but it’s a charming place to visit and to eat a piece of cake if you are ever traveling through central Missouri. The village of Arrow Rock is a National Historic Landmark and on the Dozen Distinctive Destinations list. Besides the 175-year-old tavern, there are other historic buildings, a Missouri State Park and a summer repertory theater, The Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre.

Simply known as The Old Tavern when I was growing up, the J. Huston Tavern, a state historic site, has always been used as a community gathering place. My wedding reception and my parents’ fiftieth-wedding anniversary celebration were held there. Now when I go home to visit, I’ll have to decide whether to get my carrot-cake fix at home or at The Old Tavern.

Miss Zukas

2008-04-09T14:48:00.001-07:00

I had the great pleasure of hearing author Jo Dereske speak at the Green Lake Library March 13. The photo is of me, admiring my autographed copy of Catalogue of Death, not Ms. Dereske.

Both the Seattle and King County libraries sponsor the most wonderful author lectures/readings/signings. Over the past few weeks, I’ve also seen Laura Lippman and Jodi Picoult. Alice Hoffman will be appearing at Seattle Central April 29 at 7 p.m. and at the Bellevue Library April 30 at 12:30 p.m. If you haven’t yet taken advantage of this great service our library systems offer, I suggest you make the time to attend one of the upcoming author readings. If you love books, you’ll be dazzled.

Jo Dereske is the author of the Miss Zukas librarian mystery series. Miss Zukas is a fascinating character. Dereske said when she began writing she was told no house would publish a mystery about a librarian. She took that with an “Oh, is that so?” attitude and produced Miss Zukas. But Miss Zukas is no ordinary, mundane librarian. Dereske took the clichés and multiplied them to the nth degree to produce both a one-of-a-kind and quintessential librarian who will keep you laughing as you follow her sleuthing.

Miss Zukas, or Helma, short for Wilhelmina, almost always chooses the correct and proper course. She adjusts her blinds just so to keep the furniture from fading; every surface is spotlessly clean; she drives her Buick exactly two miles over the speed limit; when she goes for a walk, she pins her key inside her pocket (no chance of Helma being locked out of her apartment or car); and she wears sensible clothes, shoes and hair. She can answer any question and does regardless of whether anyone has actually posed a query. She never allows misinformation to go uncorrected, much to the irritation of those careless with their facts. But she doesn’t rely only on book information to get at the truth of things. She makes her own observations and comes to her own conclusions. When the manual for her water-powered tooth-cleaning device warns not to use it on intimate areas, Miss Zukas checks the validity of the instructions herself and finds the results quite pleasant. Dereske builds detail upon detail of Miss Zukas’s life until you can practically hear her breathing beside you.

The one area where Helma ignores the sensible choice is in matters of the heart. Her artist friend Ruth provides the perfect foil for Miss Zukas by rarely choosing the appropriate path. In spite of Helma’s dismay at the wear and tear Ruth’s hard-drinking, man-chasing lifestyle takes on her friend, Miss Zukas doesn’t take the self-protective, pragmatic course of abandoning Ruth to own folly; she supports her friend no matter what kind of a scrape Ruth’s bad decisions get her in.

I feel an especial affinity for the Miss Zukas mysteries because they are set in Bellehaven, suspiciously similar to Bellingham, WA, not far from Mount Vernon, the site of my own mysteries. I recently completed Rhubarb Roil, the first in a series featuring a former Post-Intelligencer reporter who gives up journalism to open a fine-dining restaurant and unearth the secrets of her Dutch-emigrant family, who were among the first farmers to introduce tulips to the Skagit Valley, one of the largest bulb-producing regions in the world.

I’ve only read the first few of Miss Zukas’s adventures. Jo Dereske also writes the Ruby Crane mystery series, which I haven’t started yet. I’m so happy to have several more books to enjoy before I catch up to the eleventh Miss Zukas mystery, Index to Murder, which will be available April 29 from Avon/HarperCollins.

Duwamish Cleanup

2008-04-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

I was dismayed to realize it’s been over three months since I’ve posted here. Time!! It had also been awhile since I’d worked in a park, but I corrected that March 1 at the Georgetown Riverview Restoration Project at the Duwamish River/Gateway Park North. It was a cold and cloudy day, so the pictures aren’t very good, but luckily, the rain held off until we’d accomplished our goals for the day.

Gateway was a new park for me. I mostly only go through Georgetown to get on I-5, though I have explored the community a little during the summer Georgetown Arts and Garden Tour. Held every July, the tour is now in its twelve year. The neighborhood sports an eclectic mix of artists and industry and is fun to walk through and gape at the odd assortment of items people consider art and the beautiful and the weird gardens.

Georgetown has an interesting history with a claim to being Seattle’s oldest neighborhood. The Duwamish were the first recorded inhabitants. They called their community Tu-kweltid-tid, by the riverbank. Europeans arrived in 1850, and in 1871, Annie and Julius Horton platted their land into a town, naming it after their son George in honor of his graduation from medical school.

The Duwamish River played an important role in the development of Georgetown. The city’s skewed street layout is based on the river’s original path. Regular flooding created fertile soil, and the river valley provided a rich habitat for salmon, trout, clams, oysters and waterfowl. Farmers sold their produce at Pike Place Market. Hops grew particularly well, and in 1883 the Seattle Malting and Brewing Company opened and grew to become the sixth largest brewery in the world. Seattle residents boated down the river to visit waterfront beer gardens. But in the usual way of human history, government leaders couldn’t leave a good thing alone, and in the name of encouraging industry by providing cheap, accessible factory sites, ten of the sixteen bends in the Duwamish were removed by 1917, rerouting the river nearly a mile away from Georgetown. Industry flourished, and the Duwamish is now an ecological catastrophe and a Federal Superfund Cleanup site.

Currently, Gateway Park North, at the end of 8th Avenue South, is the only public access point to the Duwamish River in Georgetown. I learned about the cleanup and restoration project through a Washington Native Plant Society e-mail notice. As a Native Plant Steward, I watch for nearby work opportunities and was delighted to play a part in adding native plants to this tiny pocket park. Earth Day, Saturday, April 19, is the next scheduled work party from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Duwamish Alive! is sponsoring this event, which will include eight work sites along the river and an Earth Day Festival at the Cooper School near Pigeon Point Park from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. with free food, performances, giveaways, etc. It will be a great way to spend a Saturday. Pick a spot closest to you along the river, and come join us!

Introducing Sonika

2007-12-15T10:24:00.001-08:00

My very good friend, Eilis Flynn, announced the release of her third novel December 13. Introducing Sonika is currently available as an e-book from Cerridwen Press.

I bought her latest novel early Thursday morning and started reading immediately. This book is a fantasy with superheroes and dastardly villains. An exciting setup and sympathetic characters hooked me right away. I’m looking forward to finding out how heroine Sonya Penn will use her superpowers. And what course her romance with physicist John Arlen will take.

If you’ve never read an e-book, you should check it out. There’s a long list of advantages of e-books over print books—save forests, money, time and space—to name a few. You can buy e-books online 24/7, usually at a fraction of the cost of the very same print book. I use MS Reader (a free download) on my PC. My Microsoft e-reader shows the pages like a print book so there’s no scrolling, it bookmarks my place, the type is easy on the eyes and you can change the font size. It will even read the book to you if you want. Thus, any e-book can be a large-print or audio book. You can save thousands of books on a computer, hundreds on a CD, and you can buy a handheld reader to take them with you everywhere you go. You’ve probably seen Amazon’s new Kindle reader in the news, and there are many others available, i.e. Franklin E-Bookman, Hiebook, Rocket E-Book, Sony Digital Reader. I don’t own a handheld device, so I can’t give a personal recommendation. My understanding is they all have advantages and quirks, including a wide range of prices, so I’d suggest researching before purchasing.

Naturally, I think e-books are great since my two contemporary romances, Special Delivery and Big Bad Wolfe, are available at Wings ePress as e-books as well as paperbacks. You can also buy them on Amazon (paperback) and at Fictionwise (discounted e-book). Save a tree, read an e-book. Not a bad slogan.

Black & White & Green Allover

2007-11-30T13:18:00.000-08:00

I did it again. Forgot my reusable, ever-so-green shopping bags. I bought the black and white striped bags at IKEA months ago, but I’m having a hard time forging the habit of actually getting them inside the supermarket. As the estimable frog said, “It isn’t easy being green.”

According to Scott H. Young on lifehack.org, it only takes three to four weeks to make a habit automatic. Of course, he’s only nineteen, so what does he know? In spite of his extreme youth, he does seem to have some good ideas, though. He says, “Consistency is critical if you want to make a habit stick. ...Activities you do once every few days are trickier to lock in as habits.” I think that’s my problem—I usually only do grocery shopping once a week, so it’s difficult to remember the reusable bags.

A clerk at Fred Meyers gave me a good tip. When I told her I was mad at myself for forgetting my shopping bags, she suggested putting them in the trunk of my car (I suppose I should take the bus if I really want to be green, but that’s another blog.) as soon as I unload the groceries. That way, they’re always with you even if you make an unplanned shopping stop. I’ve adopted this policy, but on my last supermarket excursion I left the bags in the car and didn’t think of them until I had my shopping cart almost full. I could have temporarily abandoned the cart to retrieve the bags from the parking lot, but I was too lazy, plus I was afraid a clerk might start restocking the items it had taken me almost an hour to choose.

The trunk-storage tip was the first time a clerk had seemed somewhat favorably disposed toward shoppers bringing their own bags. My previous experiences with checkers had been slightly to markedly hostile. Initially when I presented my shopping bags to a clerk with a cheery “I’ve brought my own!” greeting, fully expecting to be praised for my commendable environmental consciousness, I received a scowl in return. I soon saw why. The IKEA bags were designed for housewares, not food. They’re too big to fit comfortably in the space the checker has to use while bagging the groceries, and once full, they’re way too heavy for a smallish clerk to easily place in the shopping cart. Thanks to weight lifting, I don’t mind the bags being heavy when I have to unload them when I get home, but watching the clerk struggle made me realize why she wasn’t particularly endeared with my totes.

Since my IKEA purchase, many grocery stores have started selling in-house reusable bags. Recently, Fred Meyer had a coupon for three free bags if you spent $75 on groceries. I generally spend around $100 on a shopping trip, so I asked the clerk to put my purchases into the three bags I expected to receive from the coupon, but I was a few dollars short. You can imagine how happy she was to have to unload the groceries and repack them in my giant IKEA bags. The next time I was at the store the coupon was still in effect, but this time I kept a running tab on a calculator to make sure I spent enough money to get the free bags.

The Fred Meyer bags are smaller than the IKEA totes, so they’re easier for the clerks to use. Now when I present them to a checker, the reaction is usually no more negative than a small sigh. I suspect management has conducted training sessions on staff acceptance of reusable bags. The store gives a five cent rebate for each bag a shopper brings in, so presumably the corporation wants to encourage their use. Company policy is not always enforced, though. Some time ago, I asked a clerk about how they recycle plastic bags. The store provides a large container for plastic with a sign thanking customers for recycling. The clerk responded, “We recycle them into the garbage bin out back.” That’s when I quit returning plastic bags to grocery stores.

But I really do want to stop contributing plastic to landfills, and I’m hoping reusable shopping bags might help. If I can just manage to use them. Dr. Stephanie Burns is another Web source for establishing new habits, but I’m not so sure I want to practice all of her suggestions, one of which is to wear a rubber band on your wrist. Considering how often I’ve forgotten my reusable bags over the past few months, all I can say is, “Ouch!”

Vandals

2007-11-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

Vandals destroyed some of the beauty in our lovely new White Center Heights Park. In June, Starbucks donated $550,000 and massive amounts of volunteer labor for the seven-day extreme makeover of the small community park. I worked six of the seven days and feel both pride and a sense of ownership. One of the things I love most about the makeover is the inclusion of art. Now part of the art is gone.

The bare posts say it all. Don Haig, Acting Supervisor III of Park Operations for King County, told me at a meeting for Friends of Hicks Lake volunteers that the glue on the post caps didn’t set properly. The vandals pulled the beautiful glass caps off and smashed them. The caps the vandals left in place were removed by King County to prevent them from being broken, too. Ironically, security cameras scheduled to be installed before the vandalism occurred were put in place just a week after the glass caps were destroyed. Not that the cameras would have prevented the destruction, but catching and punishing the culprits might have prevented future problems.

When I volunteered for a Lakewood Park cleanup in September, Geraldine, another King County employee, told me Parks Operations plans to replace the caps with new ones made of some kind of material less likely to be broken, i.e. plastic or metal. I’m guessing the replacements will not be as beautiful as the original glass caps. So sad not everyone shares in the desire to improve our White Center community.

Some time ago, my sister and I rode on the subway during a visit to Hollywood. We sat, outraged but silent, watching a vandal use a knife to scratch a message on a window. We both wanted to stop him but were afraid—after all, he had a knife. Now, I’m asking you to do what I say, not what I did. If you see someone degrading our shared public spaces, do something. You don’t need to put yourself in danger. You probably carry a cell phone; go where you won’t be seen and call the authorities. Everyone who loves parks will thank you.

Llamas Revisited

2007-09-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had a chance to visit Blessed Be Ranch and the llamas that served as models for the cover art for my romance, Big Bad Wolfe. Tim and DeAnna Pierick, the owners of the ranch, threw a birthday party for Tim. Tim’s not saying what birthday we were celebrating, but there’s some gray in his ponytail.

The herd has grown. Purchases and births have added several new llamas and alpacas. Babies contribute a cute factor to go along with the elegance of the moms, and pygmy goats provide humor. It was fun to meet the newcomers and greet the old-timers from the original photo session.

Why llamas on the cover of a romance? The hero of the novel is Brandon Wolfe, a sexy llama rancher who is raising his two sons without any outside help since the death of his wife in an auto accident. His strict ideas about childcare are thrown into turmoil when he meets generous, warm-hearted Corey, the owner of a children’s resale clothing store.

See if you can pick out the cover-art stars in the birthday photo above.

Wings ePress, Inc.

Graduation and Granddaughter

2007-09-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

August has been a busy month. My husband and I traveled to Utah for our daughter’s graduation from BYU. We stopped along the way in Gooding, ID, for a visit with my husband’s sister and her husband. They are building several homes along Clover Creek, and we stayed in the first one to be completed. The sound of running water makes for soothing dreams. My SIL has a flair for interior design and has done a fabulous job of decorating the house. It’s like vacationing in a top-notch resort. You can take a virtual tour of their home. The second house is well on its way to completion and promises to be even more impressive than the first.

While we were in Idaho, we attended the 22nd Annual Three-Island Crossing near Glenns Ferry. If I read the counter correctly, I was the first person to go to their Web site. Check it out if you want to be the second. It was a fun but somewhat disappointing event. In an reenactment of Oregon Trail crossings, horses and oxen swim and wagons float across the Snake River. I had envisioned hundreds of wagons lining up to enter the water, but there was only one. The currents can be treacherous, there have been deaths at previous reenactments, but according to the announcer, the main reason there were so few participants this year was because the number of people who know how to drive the wagons and ride the horses for a crossing are dwindling. My father talked to me once before he died about how much knowledge of farming would be lost when he was gone. Sad to see the old skills slip away.

Then on to Utah for the graduation. My mother, sister, and our son and his wife and daughter all joined us to celebrate our daughter’s art-education degree. We drove to the Great Salt Lake, heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing, toured Temple Square, visited the Salt Lake City Library, did a Gallery Stroll and explored the Springville Museum of Art where my daughter has just begun working in an educational outreach position. The convocation for the College of Fine Arts and Communications was a great event with interesting (short!) talks and videos of some of the outstanding accomplishments of the arts and communications graduates. My husband and I, of course, were so proud we could barely contain our enthusiasm and tears.

When we returned to Seattle, we had another week of excitement. Our son and DIL and nine-month-old granddaughter continued on from Salt Lake City to stay with us. Playing tourists in our own home, we visited Woodland Park Zoo, the Seattle Aquarium, Pike Place Market and Seward Park. What a thrill to play with our granddaughter. I love watching babies’ faces as they play. All those zillions of neurons firing in a nanosecond, learning about the world. They’ve gone home to Californian now. Our house is way too quiet.

Music for White Center

2007-07-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

Things are popping in White Center this summer. Friday, July 13, the White Center Arts Alliance kicked off the first of the White Center Music Nights. My husband and I spooned up delicious Indian food at Mehra’s Indian Grill to a 20s and 30s jazz tempo performed by Del Rey and Craig Florey. Then we went on to Café Rozella for dessert and rap/hip hop with a conscience by Global Heat. Other participating restaurants were the Salvadorian Bakery, 88 Restaurant, Pho 54 and Taqueria Guaymas. We were disappointed that we didn’t have enough time or enough room in our stomachs to go everywhere. But we can try again in August. Music Nights in White Center will be held the second Friday every month through October.

If you can’t get enough of a music fix at Music Nights, you can go to Café Rozella at 7:00 p.m. any Friday all summer. Last Friday, we listened to Children of the Revolution. It was a very Seattle experience as it was raining. Usually, the bands perform in the plaza in front of the café; last week, they sang and danced flamenco inside the tiny coffee shop. As many people as could fit crowded inside. We huddled under a dripping table umbrella outside and peered in the window. It was still fun, though. Tonight, we’re going to hear Eduardo Mendonca. It doesn’t look like it’s going to rain.

Last Saturday, as a part of Seafair—Seattle’s Summer Celebration, the White Center Jubilee Days Parade was held. I took all of the pictures posted here at the parade. The one at the top is of music of a different kind, the John F. Kennedy High School Lancer Marching Band.

The Seafair Pirates were out in full force, terrorizing children and old ladies and handing out candy. The boom of the cannon from their pirate ship on wheels could be heard for blocks. The pirates have been marching in parades and gracing other Seafair events since 1949.

White Center's parade began many years ago as a decorated-bicycle parade for children. A Little League team carry on the tradition.

A drill team adds flair to the parade.

And what would a parade be without beauty queens? The White Center Jubilee Days Parade had a full quota.

Politicians joined the parade, too. This doggy is for Dow, Dow Constantine that is.

The parade was part of a two-day street fair that included food booths, arts and crafts, children's entertainment on the community stage, a carnival and a Saturday night street dance. Rain was eminent the entire weekend, but in typical Seattle fashion, a good time was still had by all.

Makeover

2007-07-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

July 4 is a great day to write about parks, considering many celebrants spend their holiday in one. June 8-14 was an exciting park week for me. As a part of their Neighborhood Parks Program, Starbucks Coffee Company donated $550,000 to King County Parks (the largest gift they’ve ever received) for an "ultimate makeover" of White Center Heights Park. I (along with a total of 1,500 other volunteers) worked one of the two four-hour shifts every day of the renovation except Sunday, laying sod, grubbing blackberries, hauling and spreading wood chips, and shoveling mulch. It was thrilling to watch the park take shape.

By Friday morning, June 15, the park was ready for the unveiling and dedication. In typical Seattle style, the event was accompanied by rain, but the drizzle didn’t douse the spirits of the hundreds of children from White Center Heights Elementary who had walked across the street for the party. When King County Executive Ron Sims took the stage, I heard a little girl solemnly tell her friend, "He’s a politician." Other dignitaries spoke, including Executive Director of the White Center Community Development Association Aileen Balahadia, King County Parks Director Kevin Brown,. Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington Daniel Winterbottom, Starbucks Coffee Company Regional Marketing Manager Heywood McGuffee, King County Councilmember Dow Constantine, and Washington State Representative (D-Seattle) Joe McDermott, who helped secure $500,000 in the Capital Budget for the next phase of renovation at the park, including wetlands restoration and water quality improvement. A Native American gave a particularly moving talk about respecting and loving the land, but I failed to note his name, as did King County in their news release. Shame on them and shame on me.

After the speechifying was over, the crowd swarmed into the park, exclaiming over the beauty of the plantings and art and lining up for the hotdogs for the children and ethnic food (Indian, Central American/Mexican, Vietnamese) donated by local restaurants for the adults. One of the unusual features of the new park is a traditional imu, or underground pit for roasting pig. Imu is the Hawaiian name for the pit; the park signage probably calls it something else, but since I once lived in Hawaii, imu is the word I know best. Community members, including me, attended several meetings last fall and winter to plan what we wanted for the renovated park. Since White Center has, among 80 other nationalities, a large contingent of Tongans and Samoans, an imu was strongly recommended, and the University of Washington students included it in their park design. Pacific Islanders started their preparations on Thursday for the roasted pork that was served at the unveiling on Friday. It was totally delicious.

Okay, how lame is this? A picture of a picture. But I was included on the Starbucks poster that is displayed on an events kiosk at the park entrance, and I wanted to flaunt my moment of celebrity.

Harrison, one of my Cub Scouts when I worked in the Scouting program, made this owl house, along with numerous songbird and bat houses, for his Eagle Scout project. I’m so proud of him. The birdhouses are a great addition to the park.

Art is a big part of the new park. The King County Parks site has an all-inclusive slide show documenting the park makeover from the initial park-planning meetings to the final dedication. You can see the decorative glass being poured, fitted into the columns, etc. It was a fascinating process. Check it out.

"Souvenir"

2007-06-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

Souvenir is currently playing through June 10 at the ACT Theatre in Seattle. Patti Cohenour’s portrayal of real-life Florence Foster Jenkins, pictured on her album cover above, is laugh-out-loud funny, though the play’s central themes are of serious interest to artists. Ms. Jenkins, known as Flo to her long-time accompanist and friend, Cosme McMoon, was aria challenged but gave recitals to paying audiences consisting originally of her wealthy friends. The concert proceeds went to charity and her popularity grew, resulting in the production of the album and larger crowds, culminating in an overflow audience of 2,000 at Carnegie Hall in 1944. She died a few months later.

Cosme, portrayed by Mark Anders, narrates the play and struggles with the issues of the market value, popularity and ultimate worth of art. The music he writes is ignored while the truly terrible singing of Flo is acclaimed. He wonders at her confidence: does she hear something different in her head than what comes out of her lips, does she know how she sounds and capitalizes on it, is she the ultimate trickster or mad naïf?

As an author, I attend many writers’ conferences, and I always love to hear other authors tell their personal stories. Often, you hear an underlying shadow of self-criticism of their work. Large doses of courage are required to send you heart and soul out into a critical and rejecting world. Writers agonize: am I good enough, should I keep trying? Apparently, Flo didn’t agonize. She had no talent, but she did her thing and was successful anyway. I can think of several extremely popular writers who I believe fit into the same category.

Joe Adcock says in his Seattle Post-Intelligence review that laughing at Jenkins is like laughing at the disabled, but I disagree. The disabled don’t choose their situation; Florence Foster Jenkins chose, for whatever reasons, to perform. When we choose to perform, we invite the reaction of our audience.

Go see the play; I highly recommend it. Or you can listen to samples of Flo’s singing on Amazon. And you can read excerpts and reviews of my books on my Web site, www.linda-wallace.com, or at my publisher’s site, Wings ePress. I bravely invite your reaction. Even if it’s laughter.

Volunteer

2007-05-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

I’ve taken part in three plant/land events this last week. The photo is of me wearing my White Center Spring Clean tee-shirt and Trust for Public Land hat.

Friday, May 11, I worked for the Washington Native Plant Society to prepare for the spring native plant sale at the Bellevue Botanical Garden on Saturday, May 12. Tuesday, I attended the 12th Annual Conservation Awards Breakfast sponsored by the Cascade Land Conservancy, and this weekend I volunteered at the 4th Annual White Center Spring Clean, organized by the White Center Community Development Association.

I’m always glad to see the labels at the WNPS sales. The sales, held in the spring and the fall, raise money for Plant Society activities such as native restorations and educational outreach. But the labels, tidily affixed to a pot containing only one native species, provide a much-needed refresher course in plant identification for me, so much easier than trying to pick them out amongst the jumble of nature-gone-wild in the forest. It’s like any other skill, use it or lose it, and since my native plant stewardship training in 2001, I haven’t used it enough to remember all of Washington’s native plants.

Then I had breakfast with the governor (along with 1800 others). Gov. Christine Gregoire said she couldn’t bring all of the Land Conservancy supporters to Olympia, so she brought Olympia to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle. There she signed the Transfer of Development Rights into law. Frankly, I don’t entirely understand the bill, must do more research. In addition to recognizing those who’ve contributed to the conservation of lands, the breakfast was a fundraiser. According to the thank you I received in the mail the very day after the breakfast (how did they do that?), $653,705 were raised. That should help save a few trees.

At the Saturday White Center Spring Clean Up, I grubbed Himalayan blackberries Rubus discolor at Lakewood Park. If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, you probably don’t know that this species of blackberry is extremely invasive. The Washington native trailing blackberry Rubus ursinus looks quite a bit like the Himalayan variety. Ideally, you eradicate the invasive while leaving the native in place.

A large contingent of Seattle Pacific University students volunteered for the Clean Up. Working with them was a delight. One young woman I talked with was born in the Ukraine. Her family moved to the U.S. when she was only eight months old, but they continued to speak Ukrainian in her home, so she’s bilingual. This summer she’s going back for the first time. She’ll be working in an orphanage.

A group of young men made the time-consuming, hard physical labor of digging up blackberry roots pass more quickly by inventing stories. One student would start a fantasy, and the next one would pick it up and elaborate. Since I’m a writer (you can read about my work at www.linda-wallace.com), I was thrilled at their choice of entertainment. The stories were pretty good, too.

When the Spring Clean was over, I returned home tired, with scratched wrists (must remember to wear my gauntlet gloves next time) but content. Volunteering. It makes me happy.

Best Neighbor Award

2007-05-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

I live in a great neighborhood. On our block you find a myriad mix of ethnicity, life style and personality.

A middle-aged couple who were born in the Philippines live next door to me. They regularly extend invitations to their grandsons’ birthday parties where lumpia, pancit and adobo are served.

The rhodies in the photo above are grown by an elderly Vietnamese couple who live across the street from me. Theirs is a multigenerational home, but the old folks do the gardening. One of their relatives is a Catholic priest who frequently holds prayer groups at their house.

An Ethiopian family live next to the Vietnamese. The wife is a nurse. The husband has a degree in theology and recently sold his import shop. The oldest daughter is studying journalism at the University of Missouri in my home state.

We have Hispanics, Tongans, blacks and whites. A gay couple, artists, musicians and mechanics.

One of our neighbors is a woman who owns an art installation business. If you see a new art exhibition at the Frye Art Museum or one of the large downtown Seattle corporations, chances are it was set up by the woman who lives on our block. I intended to include a picture of her art car, but she’s not at home, and I’m too impatient to wait for her return to get the shot.

But the person I especially want to write about today is a man who was originally from Kansas. He survived a deadly tornado there as a child and went on to become a machinist and cook in the Navy. A large man, he’s married to a tiny Japanese woman. Now he’s retired and takes care of everybody on our block. He put up the support structure for the grapes in my garden. He fixed the lights in my home’s entryway. He drives my husband and me to the airport whenever we travel and picks us up when we return.

Saturday, we visited him in the hospital. He’s been diagnosed with colon and stomach cancer. Friday, the surgeons removed a big section of his colon. Chemotherapy for the stomach cancer comes next. But in spite of the anxiety and fear he must be experiencing, two days before his surgery he changed the oil and sharpened the blade on my lawnmower. In the hospital one day after a major procedure, he cracked jokes and played the role of genial host. You could never find a better neighbor, and I’m sending all good wishes for his full recovery.

I Love Spring

2007-04-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

My garden bursts into a frenzy of blooming in April. The fern-like plant with the pink flowers is our native Pacific bleeding heart. The tall stems of tiny yellow flowers is another native--fringecup. The Skagit Indians pounded fringecup, boiled it and drank the tea for any kind of sickness, especially lack of appetite, not a remedy I’m ever likely to be in need of. The bluebells and not-yet-flowering iris are not Pacific Northwest natives, but isn’t the blue beautiful? I have a sea of blue washing all through the yard and garden. The bluebells are borderline invasive, but I love them anyway.

Plants play an important role in the settings of my novels. Some reviewers have mentioned how they felt they were really a part of the scene when they read my books. You can read excerpts of the novels and the reviews on my Web site: www.linda-wallace.com.

Lilacs are special to me because I associate them with my childhood in Missouri. My grandmother had huge purple and white lilac bushes, big enough to climb inside and hide. My mother has large lilacs now, too. My lavender lilac doesn’t get enough sun, so it’s rather stunted, but it still produces the lovely familiar fragrance that transports me back to my tomboy skinned-knee days.

Azaleas grow on both sides of the front steps. What a glorious color!

I planted the dianthus last summer in an old watering bucket. It came back this spring with a new round of pretty little pink flowers. I bought pots and pots of dianthus last spring to decorate the tables for a garden party in honor of my daughter’s wedding. My daughter and son-in-law will celebrate their first anniversary May 5. I think the return of the dianthus must be a good sign for a successful marriage.

Street Festival

2007-04-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

The Cambodians threw a party yesterday, the 5th Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Street Festival. I’m not Cambodian, but I felt welcome.

It was a small event for a street festival--only one block--but the fairgoers more than made up with enthusiasm for any lack in size. I only spent a few hours there late in the afternoon, but the party was an all-day affair from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and included music, dance, contests and food.

I made it to the festival in time to see the banana-eating contest, just the very end of the male round but early enough to cheer for all of the female contestants. The audience was whooping it up when I arrived; they clearly thought this was hilarious entertainment.

The stage was backed by a large painting of Ankgor Wat in shades of purple, pink and orange with a banner of blue and red stripes behind the painting. Together, the two made a creative facsimile of the Cambodian flag, the only flag that incorporates a building in its design. I got that bit of information from the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial site. I vaguely knew there was a Cambodian museum in White Center, but I’ve never been there even though I’ve lived in this community for 17 years. Shame on me. I will definitely visit the museum and memorial soon.

Next came three rounds of hacky sack competition to see who could keep the footbag in the air with the greatest number of consecutive kicks. Then the winners of each round competed against each other. That worked great for one little boy who survived the elimination round with only 5 kicks because everyone in his group was a dud. I sort of lost track, but I think the grand champion, who received an elaborate trophy, won with around 50 kicks, a combined score from the elimination and final rounds.

The MC for both events, banana eating and hacky sack, was great. He explained rules and kept up a running commentary in both the Cambodian language, Khmer, and English. When he was counting the hacky sack kicks, though, he mostly used the Cambodian language. I ought to know how to count in Khmer by now, but I can’t remember beyond "one," phonetically something like "moo-uhy."

The entertainment for the last hour or so I spent at the festival was music. The MC pushed a very large pink pig--for 2007, the year of the pig--out onto the pavement to preside over the dance floor. A lovely dancer invited my husband and me to join in, but we declined, not having the flexible wrists and fingers required for the elaborate hand movements. A couple of different bands and several singers performed--all very interesting but way too loud for my middle-aged ears.

To put some distance between me and the musicians, I checked out the vendors and decided to sample papaya salad, something I’ve wanted to try ever since I saw "The Scent of Green Papaya." It was delicious: long shreds of green papaya mixed with tomatoes, peanuts and a hot and spicy dressing; however, there was a mystery ingredient--crab leg shells. No crab that I could detect, just bits of shell and one small leg with no crab in it. I don’t know if the shell was there to provide flavor for the dressing similar to the way you can boil shrimp shells to enrich seafood stock or if I was just unlucky to get only shell and no crab. In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the salad in spite of having to pick through it carefully to avoid crunching down on rock-hard shell fragments.

It was really a great festival. I had more fun than I have at lots of larger, more elaborate street fairs. I’m already looking forward to the 6th Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Street Festival. Maybe it will be 2 blocks long next year.

Tour Notes

2007-04-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

My husband and I returned Wednesday from a driving tour to visit far-flung family. According to MapQuest, the trip involved 52 hours and 36 minutes of driving time to cover a distance of 3,424.43 miles. I did all of the driving. My husband did a lot of snoozing. This driving feat was a personal triumph for me. I’d always thought I couldn’t drive more than four or five hours per day, but it turns out I like to drive longer distances and eight hours isn’t too difficult at all.

We started our odyssey March 12 and made a big triangle, traveling from Seattle to Gooding, ID, on to Salt Lake City, then to Albuquerque and finally to Reseda, CA, in the San Fernando Valley, before heading back home. We went through eight states and saw spectacular, ever-changing scenery. The geographic diversity in the U.S. is truly awesome.

Shoshone Falls near Twin Falls, ID. The picture at the top of the page is the Snake River just beyond the falls. At 212 feet, Shoshone is higher than Niagara Falls and is the most powerful falls in the Northwest.

The red cliffs in Utah and New Mexico are stunning. I’d visited Arches National Park on a previous vacation, but the photos here I took at rest stops along the highway.
We visited the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque. This is a wonderful museum for learning about the Pueblo Indian people and the nineteen pueblos in New Mexico. Photos, artifacts, dances, interactive exhibits and modern examples of art, jewelry, basketry and pottery instruct, and you can eat breakfast or lunch at the Pueblo Harvest Café for a taste of the Pueblo and Spanish food that has come to be known as Native New Mexican Cuisine.

Listening to Amauta in Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza was fun and relaxing. In the it’s-a-small-world category, the original founders of Amauta were from Seattle.

Our sons and our fantabulous grandchildren at the last stop on our trip.

White Center

2007-03-10T13:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I played tour guide for my community. When I invited a friend from the Eastside to dinner, she confessed to being afraid to drive through White Center. She envisioned tattooed gangsters with guns standing on every street corner. She agreed to come but only if she could bring another one of our friends along for support.

I’ve been attending White Center Community Development Association meetings for several months, so I had a fair amount of knowledge about the many current and scheduled improvements I could share with my guests. I chauffeured them around the business district, pointing out the international flavor of stores like the Heng Heng Market and restaurants such as the Salvadorean Bakery, Thai Thai, Pho’ and the Moon Indian Grill. There are many more, but those are some of my personal favorites. We visited the schools, including our two newly built, beautiful elementary buildings, White Center Heights and Mount View, and our libraries and parks.

I took particular pride in showing my friends the parks where I’ve worked as a steward planting and maintaining native plants. One of "my" parks, White Center Heights, is scheduled for a $550,000 renovation by the Starbucks Neighborhood Parks Program. The makeover is scheduled in June to take place over seven days using volunteer labor. Guess who’s going to be one of those volunteers?

My guests were suitably impressed with the neighborhood and enthused most satisfactorily at each site. The friend who’s a real estate agent was especially interested in Greenbridge, a mixed-income development of one hundred acres that potentially will house 3,500 people in 1,000 homes. The photo is from the King County Housing Authority Web site. I appreciated my guests’ interest, but what was most rewarding was by the end of the evening my friend decided she could visit me in the future with having someone along to ride shotgun.

Semiahmoo

2007-02-17T11:34:00.000-08:00

My husband and I just returned from a lovely little Valentine getaway at the Semiahmoo Resort at Blaine, Washington, near the Canadian border, about a two-hour drive from Seattle. From the hotel you can see White Rock, British Columbia, across Semiamoo Bay. Every three months, before the Medicare prescription drug benefit was established, we used to line up for the custom inspection at the Peace Arch Border Crossing in order to drive to a White Rock pharmacy to buy medicine at a reduced rate. This trip was way more fun.

Semiahmoo is located at the end of a narrow, mile-long spit which curves around and forms the entrance to Drayton Harbor. The entire 1,100-acre development is a natural wildlife preserve, home to bald eagles, great blue herons, sandpipers, cormorants, belted kingfishers and many other shorebirds. Unfortunately, because it is such a beautiful place, the inevitable developments are springing up at a mad pace. You would think construction would be limited in a wildlife preserve, but that doesn’t appear to be true.

The site was once a salmon cannery operated by the Alaska Packing Company. Salmon were packed there until 1965 and labeling of packed salmon continued until 1974. The hotel displays numerous fascinating historic photos documenting the salmon-canning days and the Native Americans who lived in the area long before the cannery was built. Of special interest to me were the pictures of the women who worked at salmon packing. Why do you suppose in old group photos the women are smiling and the men look grim? Attitude, I think. I imagine the work was equally hard for both sexes.

One of the main attractions at Semiahmoo for my husband and me was the spa. During our courting days, we visited La Costa in California and loved it. My husband thought facials weren’t for manly men but changed his mind after relaxing under the ministrations of Gracie’s magic fingers. We both booked massages at Semiahmoo, and all I can say is, "More!!" Massage is addictive. Now that I’m home I’m craving another one. Neck and back are just too tense—must have muscles kneaded. I think Semiahmoo will be seeing us again quite soon.

Bitten

2007-02-12T18:58:00.000-08:00

This morning, upon seeing a German shepherd running loose about a block away from me, I reversed the direction of my walk to avoid a confrontation and chose a street I wouldn’t have ordinarily taken. That may seem overly cautious—after all, the shepherd might have been a friendly pooch—but I was recently bitten by a Chihuahua.

Don’t laugh; it hurt! Chihuahuas have amazingly strong jaws and sharp teeth for such little guys. To add insult to injury, the owner was standing right there in her yard, telling me Cocoa would never hurt anyone. On a different walk, an owner said, "He doesn’t bite," right when the dog (this was a big one) latched onto my arm, but that time the teeth didn’t go through my jacket sleeve. Cocoa’s teeth pierced my pants leg, breaking the skin and making a baseball-sized purple bruise.

My husband has always told me it’s the little yappy dogs you have to watch out for. Ankle nippers, he calls them. I should have listened. Instead, I was lulled by Cocoa’s diminutive size into thinking he was harmless. Usually when I’m intimidated by a barking dog, I follow the advice I read in a magazine once: stand still, don’t make eye contact or any sudden moves and say, "Good boy, good boy," in a high-pitched voice. That’s worked in the past. I didn’t use my technique on the big dog that grabbed my arm because I though his owner would control him. Silly me.

Apparently, dog bites occur all too frequently according to Dog Bite Law.

"There is a dog bite epidemic in the United States. There are almost 5 million victims annually -- about 2% of the entire population. 800,000 need medical attention. 1,000 per day need treatment in hospital emergency rooms. Between 15 and 20 die per year. Most of the victims who receive medical attention are children, half of whom are bitten in the face. Dog bite losses exceed $1 billion per year, with over $300 million paid by insurance." http://www.dogbitelaw.com/PAGES/statistics.html Sponsored by Kenneth M. Phillips. Accessed on 2/12/2007.

I didn’t actually need medical attention after my bite, but I did call the Group Health 24/7 consulting-nurse line when I got home and discovered my ankle was bleeding. I had visions of rabies even though my husband said there are very few cases these days. Still, no matter how minute the statistics, I didn’t want to be one of them. The nurse asked if my tetanus shot was up-to-date (it was), told me to wash the wound with soap and water (I knew that from my Boy Scout leadership days) and said to check to see if the dog had been vaccinated.

Now here’s the ugly part. I walked back to Cocoa’s house and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. Now I’m mad. The incident had only occurred a few minutes ago; I thought the owner had to still be at home. Bang, bang, bang. I pound on the door. Cocoa jumps up in the window to bark at me. After a long siege on the door I finally give up and leave my business card stuck in the door frame with instructions written on the back of the card to call me immediately.

A half hour or so later I get the call, not from the woman I’d seen in the yard but from her husband. Yes, they had left home immediately after the bite. They were at a meeting, but their child had called them, hysterical and distraught thinking Cocoa would be taken away, to give them my message and phone number. Now I feel really, really terrible. I had terrorized the poor child. Never, ever would I do that intentionally.

The father did not castigate me for abusing his child but apologized profusely for letting their unleashed pet run out into the street and reassured me that Cocoa’s rabies vaccination was current. He offered to give me a copy of the vaccination record and promised to observe Cocoa for any signs of rabies.

The puncture wound healed and the bruise faded in a few weeks, but I still feel bad about frightening the child. In fact, I avoid walking on the street where Cocoa and his family live. That’s partly because I don’t want the family to see me and partly because I don’t want Cocoa to bite me again.

Still, none of this would have happened if Cocoa had been on a leash, so I’m sending out a plea to all dog owners: Please keep your pet fenced, leashed or in the house—for its sake and mine.

Lullaby

2007-01-26T09:42:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a front-page story Monday that proved to be an antidote to all of the other apocalyptic headlines in that issue which I’d resolutely refused to read: "5 shot at Kent restaurant," "L.A. vows crackdown on its entrenched gangs;" "Kaczynski, victims clash over Unabomber papers;" "Iran flouts sanctions as new missile tests are conducted;" "Sudan government bombing Darfur villages, rebels say;" and "Any way the war ends, country’s forecast bleak." Well, actually I skimmed them, but the story I chose to read in full was "Composer collecting and dishing out lullabies" by P-I reporter Carol Smith, photo by Joshua Trujillo.

The composer is Masguda Shamsutdinova, a formally trained musician and professor of ethnomusicology from eastern Russia, who moved to the U.S. with her family four years ago to allow two sons to attend the University of Washington. Neither Shamsutdinova nor her husband could speak English then, so she ended up working in Harborview Medical Center’s main kitchen as a dishwasher. Now she is spearheading a project to collect international lullabies which will eventually be used by the Sleep Disorders Center in a study to see if they can be used to calm patients. The clanging of the steel kettles and sinks inspired her.

I am awed by stories of starting over. I cannot see myself moving to Russia, learning the language and succeeding in finding work to support myself and my family. Yet immigrants to the U.S. do it all the time, true heroes in my eyes.

I have a neighbor who moved here from Vietnam with her family not many years ago. I met her at one of our community block parties. Shortly after the potluck, she called and asked if she could come to my house two days a week for an hour of English practice. She was searching for a job and thought her language skills were holding her back. Having just completed a stint of Boy Scout leadership, I’d decided to just say no to any new requests for volunteering for awhile, but I admired her determination to improve, so I said yes. It turned out that I benefited far more from our English lessons than she did. I now treasure her friendship and the insights I’ve gained into a culture different than my own. I even plan to base a character on my friend’s struggles with a new language in the next book I write. You can read excerpts from my two previously published novels on my Web site www.linda-wallace.com.

So, did she find her dream job? Yes, she’s delighted to now be employed by Boeing as an administrative assistant. It took persistence, though. First, she signed on as an accounting assistant at a health services firm. She then applied for and was interviewed for something like a half a dozen positions at Boeing before she was hired. I’m so proud of her. I love success stories.

Red Bush Tea

2007-01-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

I had a serendipitous moment this week while searching for herbal teas. My mother has been advised to avoid caffeine as part of the treatment for GERD. I’m not a fan of herbal teas, but some of the ones I’ve tried that tasted the best to me were produced by STASH Tea, so I went to Safeway to find a sampler for my mother, and there I found a box of red tea.

If you’re familiar with the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith, you’ll immediately know why I was so excited. Precious Ramotswe, the proprietor of Botswana's leading, and only, female detective agency, drinks buckets of red bush tea. Mma Ramotswe or her secretary, Mma Makutsi, brew bush tea for all occasions: visiting with clients and friends, relaxing under the shade of a baobab tree or to mull over a vexing problem. When I saw the box of Honeybush Blush, I pictured myself reading the next book in the series (I’ve already read the latest, Blue Shoes and Happiness), a cup of red bush tea in hand. It would almost be as though I were sitting next to Mma Ramotswe watching the giraffes stroll by. How perfect!

When I first found the tea, I thought it was produced by STASH. It was next to other STASH teas. What marketing genius, I thought, to capitalize on the popularity of the McCall Smith series. When I got home, I tried to find the tea on STASH’s Web site for more details. I wondered if the tea company would credit No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency as the inspiration for their new product. But there was no bush tea to be found. Practically everything else you might want to know about tea—it’s a great site—but nothing about the red bush version.

A closer inspection of the box of tea I’d purchased revealed that the manufacturer is actually Kalahari Limited, Authentically South African. Kalahari offers eight different red tea flavors, but all are based on rooibos (Aspalathus linearus), pronounced "royboss," also known as red tea or red bush. The tea I bought contains honeybush herb, which is also from South Africa and is supposed to be sweeter than red bush—not that I could attest to that as the brewed tea tasted just as yucky to me as all the other herbal teas I’ve ever tried.

Still, the taste didn’t deter me from sipping several cups of red bush tea while reading Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, the second novel in McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie-The Sunday Philosophy Club series. The Dalhousie series is set in misty Edinburgh rather than the desert of the Kalahari, so the effect wasn’t quite right, but oh well. Sometimes you have to suffer for literature.

Stormy Weather

2007-01-12T15:59:00.000-08:00

The inch or so of snow that fell Wednesday evening in Seattle is still on the ground. Generally when we get snow, it melts in a few hours; it’s rare for it to last for more than a day except for spots hidden from the sun.

Seattlites react mightily to even a small amount of snow. Schools close, drivers abandon their cars by the side of the freeway and employees call in sick.

"Public schools with more than 350,000 students were closed Thursday in Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and suburban and outlying areas in the western part of the state…There were about 75 minor collisions…between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., said State Patrol Trooper Jeffrey L. Merrill…In Kitsap County, a woman died after her car skidded on ice into oncoming traffic and collided with a pickup truck on State Route 307, state troopers said." Houston Chronicle January 11, 2007

This snow shower follows not long after the worst windstorm in more than a decade in Pacific Northwest history. The night of December 14, 2006, winds gusted to a record 69 mph at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, breaking the old mark of 65 mph set in 1993. Winds were clocked at 90 mph near Westport on the coast, according to CNN.com.

The wind toppled giant trees and snapped power lines. More than a million people were still without power by Friday night. Our power came back on after two and a half days, but neighbors went without power for more than a week. Many roofs were crushed. I took the photos within a few blocks of our home on my exploratory walk the day after the storm. Our house is surrounded by locust, walnut and cedar trees, so we were fortunate to have escaped unscathed. In addition to the uprooted big trees lying across a few streets, most all roads and yards were blanketed with conifer branches. We were treated to the irony of stores selling Christmas greenery while utility workers labored to clear the streets of piles of it. The few stores that were open, that is. At one nearby hardware store clerks used flashlights to escort one person at a time around the store to make their cash-only (registers weren’t working) purchases. On my way home from a walk, I picked up fir, cedar and pine and used it to make a holiday wreath, quite an attractive one, if I don’t mind saying so myself.

It’s hard to comprehend how dependent we are on electricity. I don’t know how many times I walked into a dark room and flipped the light switch. My husband was listening to a battery-powered radio when I brightly said we didn’t have to worry about the batteries giving out because they were rechargeable. Duh. A friend told how she encouraged her daughter to get up and do something so she wouldn’t feel so cold and helpless. The daughter agreed and said she’d clean the family room. The mom watched her haul the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and plug it into the socket before realization hit. The laughter probably warmed them some.

We have a fireplace so were able to warm one room. I was very glad I had gathered and saved fallen wood throughout the year from the aforementioned surrounding trees, but I was amazed at how fast it disappeared. Pioneers must have spent an extraordinary amount of time chopping enough wood to keep them warm an entire winter. Candles burn fast, too, and writing Christmas cards or reading by candlelight loses its romantic charm surprisingly quickly.

But this latest time around we didn’t lose power with the snow, at least not in my neighborhood. Since I don’t have to drive anywhere, it looks beautiful to me. I walked in it yesterday and today. All but the busiest streets are solid ice from curb to curb. I was able to stay upright, though, with my trusty old-fashioned hiking boots that weigh a ton but have major-traction soles. I did have a few whoops! moments where my feet slipped and my arms shot out for balance, but I didn’t fall. I saw a truck in a ditch, cars spinning their wheels with black smoke pouring out from under the tires, several sledders including a dad who almost hit a telephone pole and lots of snow creatures, the most memorable of which was a Cyclops with a humongous pink-stained eye and numerous twig arms. It was a fun day. I’m just so glad I don’t have to commute.

Perspective

2006-12-11T19:53:00.000-08:00

I walked a different direction yesterday. Seattle, as always, was gorgeous even though my photo doesn’t do it justice, but I was seeing the city and the Sound in a new light. Most usually I walk the avenues in West Seattle, running north and south, but yesterday, just for variety, I walked east and west following the streets. Everything looked so different! Amazing how changing your routine just a little can make a big difference in how you see things. Even if you just change the side of the street you’re walking on, the houses and yards seem entirely new even though you’ve seen them dozens of times before. It’s called perspective. Not a bad philosophy for life, actually.

Tune in a Bucket

2006-12-04T12:28:00.000-08:00

I can’t sing. Or at least I can’t sing well, but I like to try to fit my approximately three-note range into songs. At church I lustily belt out all the hymns. The poor worshipers who sit in front of me don’t make that mistake twice. Lately, I’ve been flattering myself that my voice may have improved somewhat from all the church practice. I briefly considered taking a tape recorder along to see how melodiously and closely I’ve come to hitting the notes but decided I might not ever be brave enough to sing in public again after listening to the results. Better to believe you sound better than to prove decisively it’s not true. Especially now when the Christmas carol season approaches.

My sister has a great voice. She taught elementary school music for years in Missouri and loved it. She’s one of the few people I know who actually made a living at a job she enjoyed. She’s also always on call to provide the music for weddings and funerals, and she enlivens summer tours of her historic hometown with folk songs from the Civil War. I’ve always been jealous. Why couldn’t the genes have been spread around a little better? To compensate, I learned to play the flute, self-taught, thanks to children’s band books my sister provided. Naturally, that method of instruction did not produce a great flautist, but I can play well enough (when I practice) to make music, which was my goal.

Not long ago, I complimented a young woman on a beautiful solo she’d sung at church. After bestowing kudos, I confided how I despaired of my own voice.

"I’m a terrible singer," I told her. "I sound like a frog."

"I love terrible singers," she replied.

She said she’d like to teach a class for people with horrible voices. That sounded like a great idea to me. I’ve often fantasized about taking lessons from a voice coach who would transform me into a singer of operatic rhapsodies.

I’m still waiting for her class, but in the meantime, I discovered "How to Sing in the Shower," a workshop taught by Cathleen Wilder at the Dusty Strings studio in Fremont, according to The Seattle Times. Wilder is a former opera singer who teaches a non-judgmental class on "reclaiming our birthright to sing." She instructs students in the basics from breathing techniques to the parts of the body that produce sound. The newspaper article mentions "resonating chambers." That struck a chord (no pun intended, of course) with me. I think I locate those chambers when I practice yoga to my beloved, ancient Misty Carey Yoga to Go tapes. When I chant "sat nam" (spelling?) with the instructor, I feel the sound resonate through my chest and head.

Wilder believes we need more singing in America. She’s quoted as saying that right now America is losing out on a lot of joy. She even claims we’d all sound good if we practiced more. Her motto is, "Your voice is beautiful, no matter how it sounds." Obviously, she has never sat in front of me in church.

Cranberry

2006-11-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

I was relieved to see in the November 23 issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that we don’t have to worry about running out of cranberries during this year’s holiday season. An August hailstorm in Wisconsin destroyed millions of pounds of fruit, but representatives of the cranberry industry are reassuring consumers there will be plenty of cranberry sauce for Christmas. Wisconsin is expected to match or exceed its record 2005 output of 3.66 million barrels.

I was surprised to learn that Wisconsin leads the U.S. in cranberry production and has done so, as of this year, for 12 consecutive years--in fact, growing more cranberries than the next top four states combined. Massachusetts is second, New Jersey third, Oregon fourth and my own Washington state fifth with a forecasted160,000 barrels. One barrel equals 100 pounds of berries.
I visited the Pacific Coast Cranberry Research Foundation in Long Beach, WA, in September of this year. I took the above photos there. The Foundation site includes a delightful little historical museum, a gift shop and year-round self-guided walking tours of their experimental fields. The museum is open daily from 10 a.m-5 p.m., April 1-December 15, and by appointment. The farm showcases different varieties of cranberries, irrigation systems and how crops are planted and cultivated. During October, visitors can also see the crop being harvested. I would love to go back sometime to see the flooded fields with their rafts of floating crimson berries. I’ll probably skip the gift shop on my next visit, though. The prices there are way too high for my penny-pinching consumer style. I was going to buy a jar of cranberry chutney, but when I saw the sticker price, I decided to stick with the cranberry compote that I make myself most every year.
Bog cranberry is a Washington native plant, Oxycoccus oxycoccos or Vaccinium microcarpum. I’m a Washington Native Plant Steward, so that makes the cranberry of particular interest to me. Another native cranberry is lingonberry or mountain cranberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea. Native Americans of the Northwest Coast highly prized cranberries. They usually cooked them and served them in oolichan (a small fish) grease or oil. Cranberries were also stored fresh in moss or by drying into cakes. The cakes were made by mashing the berries and either boiling them in boxes or allowing them to sit until thickened. The resulting jam was poured onto skunk-cabbage leaves within rectangular cedar-wood frames and dried on racks over an alder-wood fire. Other berries, salal being one of the most important, were made into cakes in the same fashion. Mixed-berry cakes were also common. The Cranberry Research Foundation Web site says, "…Native Americans combined crushed cranberries with dried deer meat and melted fat to make pemmican…," but my Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast field guide doesn’t mention pemmican, so maybe the Foundation is talking about aboriginal peoples of the East Coast.

The cranberries now grown commercially in Washington, however, are not native. In the 1870s, a Massachusetts visitor observed the native berries growing in the marshes and was impressed with the area's resemblance to Cape Cod. Convinced that the peat soil could be successfully adapted to the cultivation of cranberries, he brought in East Coast vines. The non-native vines also brought with them non-native pests, a common problem with introduced species. Pests and frost were only two of many problems faced by cranberry farmers over the years.

Cranberry farming began here more than 100 years ago. A partnership of 4 entrepreneurs purchased more than 1600 acres of Peninsula marshland between 1872 and 1877 for as little as $1 an acre. Many of those original bogs are still producing today, but now raw land suitable for cranberries costs over $5,000 an acre. Cranberry farming is definitely big business.

What I ultimately care about, though, is eating the berries. The Ocean Spray Web site has lots of recipes, along with a mildly amusing video on its home page of farmers in a flooded bog. Of the current 235 growers on the West Coast from British Columbia to Oregon, 99% are part of an Ocean Spray cooperative. In the what-a-hoot category, the Ocean Spray site offers a beverage recipe called the Lava Lamp. Apparently, if you put sweetened dried cranberries in champagne, the cranberries will begin to slowly float up and down in the glass.

I was planning on sharing my favorite cranberry recipe, Cranberry Keeping Cake, but after I located the grease-stained newspaper clipping dated December 4, 1991, and realized how long the ingredient list and directions are, I decided I don’t have the necessary motivation to type it all up. I’m still not that adept with my new scanner to just scan the recipe into the post. What’s interesting about this cake is, that though it’s ready to serve after a few days, it continues to improve for weeks and will keep in a cool pantry for at least 3 months. Perfect for mailing to far-flung friends and family for Christmas. I’m not sure what keeps the cake from molding, maybe all the spices: cinnamon, coriander, cardamom and cloves. And unlike the much-maligned fruitcake, this cake tastes delicious. But since I’m not giving you the recipe, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Widows Vacuuming

2006-11-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

The morning after I posted my last blog, I walked to the ocean on Seola Beach Dr. It reminded me of how beautiful the world in general and Seattle in particular can be: sword ferns, snowberry, bigleaf maples, conifers and the sea. My husband and I are sure to have many more lovely days to share. Not that I expect his immediate demise, but you can’t help but think about death when your spouse has cancer, and you’re reading about mortality rates on cancer-related Web sites. My husband asked me to make a will for him, which started a new round of research. The Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the Attorney General of Washington has useful information on their "Dealing with Death" page.

Every month or so I have dinner with a group of women I worked with when I was a Instructional Para-Educator for the Highline School District. That’s a fancy name for a teacher’s assistant. I feel very lucky to have been able to stay in touch after we were no longer working together. These are wonderfully supportive friends who laugh with abandon, enjoy good food at many different local restaurants and share important life events. They’ve admired my wedding and grandchildren photos, viewed my Web site, linda-wallace.com, and bought my books, Wings ePress, Inc.

Awhile ago, before the cancer diagnosis, my school-teaching group and I were having dinner, and I suddenly realized I was surrounded by widows. All of them had very different takes on their husbands’ deaths and their widowhood. One woman said she and her husband had always been "joined at the hip" and she missed him terribly. In fact, she didn’t think she should still be alive now that he was dead, and perhaps, if it weren’t for her children, she might have done something about that. Another woman said that she didn’t realize what she’d had until after it was gone. A third widow, a staunch supporter of getting on with your life, recommended taking a new lover as soon as possible. And finally, there was the friend who had coped by vacuuming. The photo is from treehugger. Yes, she said, vacuuming. Back and forth, back and forth, for days on end. She didn’t have to think, and her house was spotlessly clean.

These conversations were all before I knew my own husband has a life-threatening illness. Now I see, read and hear about cancer everywhere. I’m sure there must be some kind of psychological term for the phenomenon, but I don’t know what it is. When something becomes a part of your life, you see evidence of it everywhere. Like when you’re pregnant, you see ads for baby supplies; pregnant women on TV, in stores and on the street; newspaper articles on pregnancy, often with alarming statistics; novels with pregnant characters, etc., etc. Now I’m sensitive to cancer themes. In last night’s episode of "Gray’s Anatomy," http://abc.go.com/, George’s father is diagnosed with metastasized esophageal cancer. As I watched, tears formed for the fake family even though I’ve shed few, as of yet, for my husband. I’ve been trying not to, though I suspect that’s not the most mentally healthy approach to grief and fear. I feel a surge of throat-tightening, moisture-forming, sob-threatening potential and push it away. For now, at least.

Cancer!

2006-11-10T15:11:00.000-08:00

My husband has liver cancer. We got the diagnosis October 4 after a preventative ultrasound revealed a 5.5 cm tumor. My husband has known he has hepatitis C since the early 1990s and that hep C can cause cirrhosis and liver cancer, but though blood tests for viral markers have been extremely high they have also been stable, so I suppose we have both become rather complacent about the scary possibilities. He had bypass surgery in 1995, and we’ve been more concerned about heart disease than liver problems.

I had intended for this blog to be about happy things, but it’s hard to think happy when you have cancer on your mind. To be more honest, I’d hoped a blog would help to connect readers to my Web site, linda-wallace.com, and my books, Wings ePress, Inc. Everyone says it works that way, but promoting my writing doesn’t seem so very important now, either.

My husband has lots of hard decisions to make. After an EKG, heart stress test, blood tests and a CT scan, the cardiologist and surgeons say he’s a candidate for liver resection, but they will have to remove the entire left lobe, and the surgery is very risky. Take too much liver and the results can include jaundice, fluid accumulation, mental confusion and coma. The survival rates are not great, either. My husband thought the surgeon said 30%. I’ve seen different figures on various Web sites, for instance, LiverTumor.org and the National Cancer Institute. According to the American Cancer Society, "The overall 5-year relative survival rate from liver cancer is about 9%."

Radiofrequency ablation is also an option, but it doesn’t cure the patient of the cancer. Radio waves "cook" the tumor. This is not my own highly technical medical term; it’s how the doctor described what happens. If the cancer is carbonized, I don’t understand why it isn’t gone for good. One of the many things I need to find out. One of the surgeons said my husband has 1 to 2 years to live if he does nothing. RFA might add 1 or 2 more years.

Definitely not happy thoughts. I’m gathering as much information as I can. There are many sites, including lots of blogs, thecancerblog.com, for one. I hope it proves true that knowledge is power. We are both feeling very helpless right now. A little power would be a very good thing.

Disc Golf

2006-11-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

I’m miffed. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer didn’t include White Center's Lakewood Park in a list of parks that have disc golf courses. Blythe Lawrence wrote a nice piece on disc golf at Cornwall Park in Bellingham in the September 21 issue of the Intelligencer’s "1 Tank/1 Trip" feature in the Thursday "Getaways" section. Well, I think it’s a nice piece. She describes the game and her attempts to master it, but since I don’t play myself, I have no idea how accurate the information is. However, I felt like I could play after I read her article. And she does a good job of capturing the enthusiasm that is causing the sport to gain in popularity. You can even play the game online at http://disc-golf.freeonlinegames.com/ The cartoon is from that site.

I love having a disc golf course in our local park. I’ve helped establish native plants at Lakewood, enjoyed picnics there, fed the geese bread at Hicks Lake (a definite no, no) and taken my grandchildren for bike rides on the paved paths, but for a long time I didn’t know the park also served another function. I’d never heard of disc golf before I discovered we have a course right here in White Center. I’d wondered about the purpose of the numerous metal poles encircled with wire baskets and festooned with chains. Bird sanctuary? Weather-reporting apparatus? Trash can? What? Oh, disc golf. How cool!

Not everyone shares my delight in the course. Dick Thurnau, the man I wrote about in my "Benches for Bumbershoot" blog, is conducting an on-going war with the golfers. He’s convinced they’re the culprits who leave behind piles of alcoholic beverage containers in and around the trash cans (strictly illegal) and damage the trees and native shrubs we’ve planted. He has a spiral notebook full of photos he’s taken of beer cans, wine bottles, broken tree limbs, stripped tree bark, concrete tee pads in spots he considers inappropriate and other violations. He’s a voluminous letter writer to political and park officials and often mentions the disc golfers as a problem. So, that makes the two of us have a problem because I want to support the golf course.

I see his point about the plants. In the P-I article, even though she enthuses about disc golfing as a whole, Ms. Lawrence also notes, "The scars of scores of discs were visible on tree trunks throughout Cornwall Park." I don’t know how to solve that problem, but I suspect not all of the damage documented by Dick in his photos was perpetrated by golfers.

I know Dick and I share the common goal of improving Lakewood Park even if we don’t always agree on how to do it. We’re both members of Friends of Hicks Lake, an organization formed for the purpose of improving the water quality of Lakewood Park’s small pond. Dick is by far the most active, and definitely the most vocal, member. I’m wondering if I can continue to belong to a group that, thanks to Dick’s letters, is probably seen as opposing disc golf at Lakewood Park, a view exactly opposite of my own. Sigh. How can anything ever get accomplished when even people of good will can’t agree on what should be done?

White Center Pond

2006-10-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

Today, 40 industrious volunteers planted 1400 native plants at the White Center Greenway Regional Stormwater Pond. I personally planted 9 madrones, which put me rather far behind the 35 per person average. Probably because mine were planted perfectly.

The White Center Pond is a three-celled, six-acre water quality and retention facility that is part of an extensive urban lake-stream-wetland complex of approximately two miles in the Salmon Creek basin. The stormwater pond collects excess rain and street water and holds it until pollutants have a chance to settle to the bottom. Some of the water exits to the South and goes on to Mallard Lake and Hicks Lake. I wrote about my involvement with Friends of Hicks Lake in the "Benches for Bumbershoot" post. Improvements to the White Center Pond complex also help clean up the water in Hicks Lake. The native plants we put in today will take up excess water, protect the pond, feed birds and look beautiful for our community.

I felt quite proud to be among so many good people who were willing to volunteer their time and energy. Most of them were much younger than I am, which might be another reason they were able to plant more trees and shrubs than I did during our 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. work time. When I see young men and women working hard to improve our environment, it makes me hopeful for the future.

And on a side note, while speaking of good people, my husband was a beneficiary of an act of kindness this week. He was assigned to lockup his church each weekday morning after an early session of Bible study for high schoolers. When he was ready to get into his car to come home, he realized he’d locked both building and car keys in the church.

The church is rather isolated with no businesses or homes nearby. He didn’t have a cell phone with him to call for help, and he isn’t much of a walker, so he didn’t think he could make it home or to a phone. Then he saw a man and a woman walking out of a stand of trees near the church. They had parked their car in the church parking lot and slept in the woods. My husband told them about his predicament, and they offered to take him home. They drove him to our house and waited for him to get my set of keys then took him back to the church. My husband gave them $10 as a thank you, though they had volunteered to help him without asking for any compensation. I love this story. It so turns upside-down what most of us think about the homeless. The vagrants rescued the solid citizen.

Kite

2006-10-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

At the end of September, I toured a gorgeous stretch of the Oregon/Washington coast. One of the places I visited was the World Kite Museum and Hall of Fame in Long Beach—Washington, not California, home of the Queen Mary. Long Beach hosts the Washington State International Kite Festival in August. World-renown and amateur kite flyers, along with thousands of spectators, descend on the small town. Note the 2006 poster designed this year by Wendi Peterson. The kites featured on Ms. Peterson’s poster are on display at the Kite Museum.

To me, before I visited the museum, kites were only toys that little kids, like Charlie Brown, tried to fly with varying degrees of success. What I remember from the few times I attempted to put a kite up in the sky when I was a child was running until I was dizzy and discouraged with zero flight to reward my efforts. My husband knows kites. "Not enough tail," he said, and sure enough, he and my daughter managed to fly her pink kite with a regal black cat on it after adding yards and yards of tail there in Long Beach on a vacation years ago when she was small.

Modern kites are not only easier to fly than the ones that so frustrated me, they also can be powerful. Having dinner at the hotel where we stayed in Seaside, OR, my husband and I watched the kite flyers on the beach. The kites dragged fairly good-sized men along the dunes as though they were sand skiing. And when a kite first whooshed up into the air, it yanked the flyer several feet up off the ground.

The Kite Museum houses a wealth of information about the history of kites. For instance, kites were used during World War II for target practice, barrage, mail delivery and as an antenna lifter in blow-up life rafts. The first kite competition in the U.S. was at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Alexander Graham Bell and Lt. B. Baden Powell of Boy Scouting fame were among the sixteen contestants, many of whom were experimenting on using kites to lift men. And in 1906, George Lawrence used a kite to hoist a specially built fifty-pound camera to take aerial photographs of the San Francisco earthquake. His widely published photos documented the true scope of the disaster and helped mobilize the public to rebuild the city in a mere two years. The Kite Museum exhibit includes the remarkable before-and-after pictures.

I’m a bit of an airhead about history and can only absorb so much information at one time, so what I most enjoyed at the museum was feasting my eyes on the glorious kites from around the world: China, birthplace of the kite; Japan; Thailand; Malaysia and Indonesia, where the first kites were made of leaves and were used to get their fishing lines farther out to sea. And to catch fruit bats.

But never mind about how useful kites can be, what I love is the art. Birds, fish, frogs, bats, dragons, insects, warriors, bathing beauties—all depicted in intricate detail with rich, jewel-toned colors. Some emit sounds, too. Gongs and drums are controlled with miniature windmills. Whistles made from gourds, reed pipes and bamboo play songs changing with velocity. Bells produce sounds ranging from tinkling to gong-like. Hummers are produced by stretching strings of silk tied to the ends of a bowed piece of bamboo on the back of a kite.

Kite fighting is big in many cultures. When I read that the Taliban had forbidden and criminalized kite flying, I wondered why that was such a big deal. Kite flying didn’t seem all that important to me. Why would they even bother to ban it? But it’s major entertainment in many countries. Large crowds gather on rooftops in Afghanistan to battle with kites. The kite strings are coated with pulverized glass and used to saw at the opponent’s string until one of the kites is liberated. In last Sunday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer comics, Jason from the Bill Amend cartoon, "Fox Trot," attempts to destroy the competition by attaching a chain-saw to his fighter kite. But, of course, it won’t fly. Somewhat like the kites of my youth.

Fashion Conclusion

2006-10-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

I attended Macy’s Better with Time fashion show this morning. The one where I was not picked to be one of the models. In the first two blogs I posted in August, I wrote about competing in the modeling contest. Today, I wanted to see how well the women who beat me performed.

I might not have made it to Macy’s downtown Seattle store on time if I hadn’t noticed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the Alaskan Way Viaduct was going to be closed for a Heart Walk fundraiser sponsored by the American Heart Association. When I read the article, I felt a pang of guilt for enjoying the frivolity of fashion when I could be joining the 10,000 participants expected at the fundraiser. Then at Macy’s, I was confronted by larger-than-life posters of breast cancer survivors in the windows. Good causes abound, but today was for fun.

Inside the store, the runway was surrounded by dozens of tables where hundreds of attendees were being served a sit-down brunch. I hadn’t expected so many people. Maybe it was a good thing I didn’t get to be a model after all. You can bet there were some serious cases of nerves backstage.

At 10:30 a.m., Terry Ahern, Macy’s Fashion Producer, introduced our MC, Micki Flowers. The program started off with a shot of culture to offset the unavoidable triviality of fads and fashion. Mary Ann Gwinn, The Seattle Times Book Editor, presented her "Top Picks for Fall Reading." I was happy that she included some of my favorites such as The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. When she asked for a show-of-hands of how many of the audience had read the series, a gratifying number of arms were raised. Many of my fellow authors mistrust and resent book reviewers, but I don’t feel that way. I see no reason for a reviewer to say they like a book when they don’t, and even when they can’t praise your writing, they’re still bringing it to the attention of potential readers. You can see what a few reviewers have said about my books on my Web site, www.linda-wallace.com.

Then Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Art Critic, talked about "Pluralism and Northwest Art." She said artists should follow the philosophy, "You see a rule, knock it down."

The last presentation before the fashion show started was a demonstration of Shiseido’s five-minute facial. Shiseido rep Casey Jaeger said all of the Better with Time models had a facial before they donned their stage makeup.

Finally, sound the horns, bang the drums, the regular-people, fifty-or-older models pranced down the runway, wearing nifty clothes and brave smiles. They did a great job; they all were truly winners. My only regret was that I had brought my camera. I would have enjoyed the fashion parade much more if I had concentrated on simply watching the models instead of trying to photograph them. Recently on NPR, I heard Annie Leibovitz say during an interview about her latest book, A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005, that taking photos of her family and friends could be troublesome. She didn’t necessarily always want to record family events because the camera had a way of taking over. If a camera changes the nature of an occasion for a superb expert like Leibovitz, of course it would for a bumbling amateur like me.

But I did take pictures, so I posted a few of them for you. The bottom shot is of Jeanne Joseph, age 65. In the essay required for the preliminary competition, Jeanne quoted actress Billie Burke, "Age is something that doesn’t matter, unless your are a cheese." Jeanne could be on one of the posters in Macy’s window. She is a breast cancer survivor, diagnosed when she was 55.

The middle photo is of Henrietta Feinberg, age 93. Amazing, huh? She was born in 1913 in Metz, France, and came to the United States through Ellis Island in 1922. She started dancing when she was seven, taking ballet in Texas and at the Shehe Dancing School in the south side of Chicago. She traveled with a dance company from Portland, Maine, to the world’s fair in Dallas, using the stage name Henie Hagen.

The top picture is of Nadine Madison, age 70. Do you think these ladies are lying about their age? Only instead of subtracting a few years, they’re adding a decade or two. When she was 50, she left her job as an English teacher and opened a Sylvan Learning Center on Queen Anne in Seattle. Now, she says in her essay, "I still love clothes and parties, I’m more inclined to say what I think, and I’m no longer evasive about my age. I savor being 70."

I’d like to tell you about all of the fifteen models. They’re all fascinating women, but it would take too long. Instead, I’m only highlighting the three I managed to get an in-focus picture of without chopping off their heads or zooming in on their backsides. I have to say, after watching the fashion contest winners walk the runway and reading their essays, I don’t need to feel bad about being bested by any of them.

Power Line

2006-09-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was a sad day. Contractors for Seattle City Light showed up, power equipment at the ready, to prune the locust trees in my front yard. I knew they were coming. All up and down our block, they’d distributed letters informing residents of the pending butchery.

It was my fault for bringing the trees to City Light’s attention. This summer I heard a strange crackling sound outside. I searched for the source and discovered a small blaze sputtering high up among my tree branches where the power line touched some of the smaller twigs. Uncertain of what to do, I simply stood and gaped at the fire for a while. A stiff breeze pushed leaflets against the wire, producing sparks and a brief spurt of flame, then stems and twigs would smolder, sending a thin plume of smoke into the sky. Eventually, it occurred to me I needed to call the light company. I didn’t want to be responsible for burning down an entire block, not to mention my own home.

City Light responded promptly. Workers arrived within the hour to trim the branches that were making contact with the power line. Only a few cuts were needed. It didn’t look bad at all, and the fire was out. They told me then they’d have to return later to prune the trees more extensively. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t.

I love trees. I have an emotional attachment to them as though they were pets or children. When we moved into this house, one set of neighbors asked hopefully if we were going to cut down the trees so everyone could see our beautiful home. They were tired of dealing with the thousands of tiny yellow leaves that drift down all summer then come down in earnest in the fall. Poor things, they so got the wrong new neighbors. I would never remove a tree unless there was an imminent threat of it crashing down on a roof. A few years later, my husband and I did agree to share the cost of pruning the trees that grow along the neighbor’s property line and overhang their yard. Legally, they could cut those branches without our permission, but they told us they had hired a tree pruning company, and we wanted to be good neighbors, so we offered to pay half the fee. I paid $350 for a serious sobbing session.

And that’s what I did Wednesday morning--sob. The Seattle City Light contractors knocked on our door early in the morning and politely informed us we needed to move our car to make sure no limbs fell on it. I resolutely ignored the whining of the saws and grinders for some time, but finally, I had to look. I let out a shriek and burst into tears. They were cutting so much more than I had anticipated.

I went outside, found the site supervisor and told him they were removing way more of the trees than I’d expected and that I was extremely upset. Not that I needed to add that last bit as my eyes were watery, my nose was running and my skin was blotchy. I’m sure he thought I was a fool, but he courteously explained that the law required the trees be pruned a minimum of ten feet from the main power line, which carries some humongous number of volts, and five feet from a lesser line. He said the law would have to be changed for them to make their cuts any differently. Then he tried to cheer me up by saying that next spring the trees would leaf out and look much better. I wasn’t cheered.

At the end of the workday, groups of neighbors gathered to look down our block and discuss the changes. A gorgeous gigantic maple down the street from my house was also shaved halfway down one side. Its owner was unhappy but said the pruners were only doing their job. One neighbor said it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. She has a friend whose pine trees were cut down right to the ground. Thank goodness they didn’t do that to my locusts. She suggested I e-mail Seattle City Light and complain. Better yet, I should contact our three local TV stations.

I thought about doing just that, but the thing is, the trees should never have been planted under power lines in the first place. Locusts grow from 30 to 70 feet tall. Our trees towered over the power lines when we moved here. According to the Seattle City Light Web site, "…interfering tree limbs and falling trees or branches are the No. 1 cause of power outages in the Seattle metropolitan area." They offer a free copy of The Right Tree Book, or you can download an Adobe copy from their site. We were probably lucky our trees escaped unscathed for as long as they did.

But couldn’t the contractors have carried out their surgery in a more esthetically pleasing fashion? City Light’s Web site claims, "Certified Power Line Clearance contractors under the direction of Seattle City Light employees perform the trimming. Seattle City Light uses pruning standards approved by the International Society of Arboriculture which meet safety requirements of both federal and state laws." I’m not convinced, but I have to admit ten feet is a lot of tree to trim. Maybe there was no way to do it any better.

Of course, anyone who knows the locust is giggling hysterically right now. Locust is not a Pacific Northwest native. I’ve heard it called a weed tree and an alley cat tree. It is not generally prized. Both the blossoms (which, at least, do smell wonderful) and the leaves are messy. You find it growing in abandoned lots and poorer neighborhoods. But I don’t care. I love them. And I’m going to mourn the hunks of them that we’ve lost for a long time.

A Love to Kill

2006-09-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, who moved to Seattle from Vietnam not many years ago, loaned me her DVDs of the popular Korean series A Love to Kill. The male lead is rock star Rain, and his beloved/hated costar is Shin Min-ah, both pictured here.

I watched about an hour of the eight discs before I gave up, totally baffled as to what was going on. At my friend’s urging, I had watched one episode on TV previously and was equally mystified. Part of the comprehension problem is the English translation. My friend frets over her English, which is actually quite good, but she admitted that her own grammar is clearer than the subtitles on A Love to Kill.

Or maybe the lack of comprehension is do to my Western mind being unable to wrap itself around the contemporary Asian concepts of drama and love. I did get that everyone is unhappy. Extreme close-ups of tears coursing down gorgeous faces got that idea across without any words.

And that’s what I’m writing about today. Why do women of all cultures fall for the jerks? Why do we work so hard at being miserable? When are we ever going to learn that nice guys are best? That it's okay to be happy? I’m guilty myself of perpetuating the myths. I write romances (www.linda-wallace.com) in which the heroines agonize over, if not exactly jerks, inappropriate men. Of course, without conflict there’s no drama, but I worry about the messages books and movies send to women. The universal appeal of the bad boy.

In one of the scenes I watched from A Love to Kill (also known as This Love I Want to Kill/The Love of Death/Detestable Love/Knock Out by Love), the hero, Kang Bok-ku, watches a young woman, tears streaming down her face, prepare to leap from a bridge to her death. He says something like "go ahead," strolls away, and she jumps. He keeps going for a bit then apparently decides maybe he’d better do something about it after all and saves her. A real champ, right? This is the same fellow who makes a living by theft and extortion. Oh, and he’s a kick-boxer. Definitely worthy of being chased by every female character in the series. My Vietnamese friend says, "His heart is deep." Maybe. Or maybe he’s a jerk.

In Bok-ku’s defense(?) he has determined to spend his life with Han Da-jung as a reward to her for saving his life. I guess that could be considered a worthy cause. But he’s distracted when his brother steps off the guardrail of his house while reaching toward the face of Cha Eun-suk (the one in the photo) on an electronic billboard with the announcement of her engagement to a rich heir. With his brother now in a vegetative state, Bok-ku becomes film star Eun-suk’s bodyguard to make her fall in love with him so he can avenge his brother.

Does that make him a man of honor? Worth all those tears? Or just a jerk?

Judgment Day

2006-09-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

At a dinner out with friends recently, one of the women introduced the subject of pet peeves. Hers was drivers who hop out of cars parked in spaces meant for the handicapped and stride briskly away. I said mine was obese people shopping in motorized carts. If they’d get out and walk, I pontificated, they wouldn’t be so overweight and wouldn’t need to ride. Later in the evening, reflecting on what I’d said, I trembled. I could so easily be the person driving the shopping cart. Might become that person some day. If I do, will I be struck with lightning the first time my backside hits the driver’s seat as a punishment for what I so thoughtlessly pronounced at dinner?

My daughter has a more refined sense of ethics than I do. She frequently admonishes me to avoid gossip and judgment, both of which I avidly enjoy, though, as per the above example, often feel guilty about after indulging in them. A case could be made that a writer is by definition a gossip: a person who tells intimate details of others’ lives. You can read about my fictional characters’ lives at www.linda-wallace.com.

But judgment in real life is tricky. For instance, traveling with my husband. He has a number of health problems you can’t discern by looking at him other than he’s overweight. He can’t walk very far (I’m talking about from one room to another) or even stand up for very long, so we use a wheelchair to get from the curb to the gate at airports. I’m uncomfortable walking beside him as the airline attendant wheels him in front of everyone else to the pre-boarding area. He usually gets out of the wheelchair to walk down the ramp to the airplane, and I’m afraid people will think we’re pre-boarding just to get on the plane first. I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking him to try to look a little more frail and decrepit so he’ll appear to need the wheelchair.

Then there was my colleague at The Los Angeles Times. After experiencing a series of mysterious symptoms including falling down in the parking lot, she quit selling advertising to go on disability. I thought she was looking for a free meal ticket, that she was faking it. I actually made that judgment about her even though she was a close friend. She was eventually diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis. We gradually lost contact with one another after I moved to Seattle. I think about her often and would like to get in touch again, but I’m also afraid to find out how the disease has progressed. And, of course, I’m riddled with guilt over misjudging her.

Normally, I’m not one to quote scriptures, but I have to conclude that Matthew got it right. (7:1-2) "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

Benches at Bumbershoot

2006-09-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

Thursday evening, August 31, 2006, Starbucks sponsored an auction at the Seattle Center to raise money for community parks. Benches at Bumbershoot was quite an event.

I belong to a group, Friends of Hicks Lake, that works to improve the water quality of a small pond at Lakewood Park near my home. One of our members, Dick Thurnau, made and donated "Cedar Bench" for the auction. It’s the one in the right-hand corner of the flyer. Actually, you could say he’s the only member as he’s the one who does almost all of the work. He discovered he’s allergic to cedar while building his bench, so he gave a certain measure of pain, along with the construction materials and his excellent woodworking skills, to the fundraising project.

I came to Friends through the Washington Native Plant Society. I’m a Native Plant Steward and have pulled ivy, grubbed blackberry and tried to eradicate other noxious weeds at various parks in the Seattle area. Several years ago, Stephen Reilly wrote a grant that included a native plant restoration for Lakewood Park. The WNPS Steward Coordinator gave him my name as a Plant Steward who lived in the neighborhood and might be interested in helping him. I was, and we went to several local schools, elementary through high school, to give presentations about native plants to teachers and students. The students, EarthCorps and Friends of Hicks Lake (There may have been other organizations I’ve forgotten that helped. Sorry if I overlooked you.) planted trees and shrubs from King County’s nursery, and I joined Friends as another avenue to support native plants.

But I digress. Back to the auction. As artists are wont, the bench creators had gone off in myriad directions on a common theme and produced some truly wondrous works to sit on or in—several more nearly sculpture than bench. I tried on for size all 14 of them except the canvas slings suspended from a tall frame—I was afraid they’d dump me out on the floor, and I didn’t want to spill my Mudslide Martini—with a few rude pokes to my backside as a result especially from the "Peanut," middle-left on the flyer, composed of ceramic tiles grouted over high-density foam, and "Wired Basket Bench," lower-left.

Our bench viewing pleasure was enhanced by food, beverage and entertainment—a trio including singer, bass and accordion. I love events where handsome waiters pass around little trays of delicious doodads. After the free-flowing wine had had enough time to loosen the bidders’ purse strings, Larry Taylor Auctioneer, Inc. began the action. I hadn’t heard an auctioneer since I was a teenager living in Missouri. Those auctions were of cattle or of household goods after someone had died, though, not works of art. Quite a difference, but Mr. Taylor did admirably reproduce the exciting singsong I recall. I carefully hid the large number I’d been given when I arrived, didn’t want to accidentally bid, and it was a good thing, too, as one bench brought $5,500—"Edith Piaf," lower-right on the flyer. I tried to follow the flash of the numbers as the bidding went on to see just what someone looked like who could afford to pay thousands of dollars for a bench. Even the $50 price of admission was more than most of my friends would be willing to spring for. Mr. Thurnau had given me one of his artist’s comp. tickets, or I probably wouldn’t have been there, either. Two other benches brought $3,000 each, "Cedar Log Bench," upper-left, and "Cocoon," not pictured, the one I though I might fall out of.

Altogether, Benches at Bumbershoot raised $23,700 for parks. Not a bad evening's work. Of course, the artists and organizers spent hours and hours preparing. I’m extremely thankful for Seattle’s generosity in supporting our park treasures. Friends of Hicks Lake hopes to use our share of the money to go toward a floating fountain/aeration system to add oxygen to the lake. Since its inception in 2000, the Starbucks Neighborhood Parks Program has donated $2.4 million towards improving 104 local parks in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. The coffee giant provides grants to volunteer organizations to restore and revitalize parks, so if you’re a member of such a group, you should check it out at starbuckslovesparks.com. Along with a healthy dose of advertising, of course.

Darger

2006-09-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

I went to an exhibit of Henry Darger's work at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle last week. He was an extraordinary man, not always in a good way, but definitely not your average bear.

Darger apparently never shared his work with the public. When the artist died in 1973 in Chicago, his landlord, Nathan Lerner, found stacks of diaries, drawings, weather journals, an eight-volume autobiography and a 15,145-page novel in words and pictures titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, In What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger was a recluse who worked away at his writing and paintings for decades. I don't know if that is a monument to artistic passion or a testimony to an appallingly lonely life. Along with the art were collections of old newspapers and magazines, bits of string saved for bundling his manuscripts and a miscellany of other debris. It seems a small miracle that the landlord recognized the value of piles of what many would have thought of as garbage, perhaps because he was a photographer himself.

The paintings are quite beautiful but often disturbing in subject matter. Some of the larger ones are pieced together in long scrolls with many images of violence against little girls--strangling being one of the more popular. It crossed my mind that he might have painted what he knew--a serial killer who got away with it--but in reading about his life I came across nothing to suggest that could be true. You can't view the drawings without noting that a great many of the girls have small penises. Some say the girls have penises because they're empowered princesses, some think they're Darger's emotional surrogates and some speculate that he never learned the anatomical difference between boys and girls. Who knows?

What I find more interesting is the whole idea of working for a lifetime without recognition. In our time of celebrities, creative and not-so-creative people--artists, writers, actors, musicians, athletes, newscasters, politicians, your next-door neighbor--all compete madly for attention with press releases, Web sites, blogs, sound bites, sky writing. Look at me, look at me! (Look at me at www.linda-wallace.com.) Would I continue writing if I thought no one would ever read a single word I wrote? I don't think so.

My daughter and I often bemoan the fact that an artist has to be a businessperson if she is to have any chance of making a living with her work. At her university art students often major in business. You have to be very skilled at saying "look at me" if you are to succeed in a creative field. So sad.

I wonder if Henry Darger would have posted on a blog if he'd had the technology available to him. It's probably a good thing he never had the opportunity. He might never have had the time to write about the Vivian Girls.

Runway

2006-08-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

During the days approaching the Better With Time Modeling Contest, I noticed a strange reluctance to do anything that might mar my appearance. I put up a batch of plum jam like I do every summer when the red plums on my backyard tree ripen, but this year I fretted over the brown stains on my fingers and nails. Normally, I ignore the stains or maybe even admire them as a badge of honor for following the arcane craft of my grandmothers, but now I was afraid the judges choosing the finalists for Macy’s Seattle Better With Time Fashion Show in October might reject me because of my ugly hands. Should I pumice the calluses, paint the nails and stop using them, effectively relegating my hands to the status of a 12th century Chinese woman’s bound feet—considered beautiful but ultimately useless?

Other activities took on an aura of danger. My bicycle’s back tire was off whatever the name of the thing is that connects the tire to the frame. With great difficulty, not being particularly mechanically inclined, I put it back on by eliminating the kickstand. Now black grease joined the brown plum stains under my fingernails, but I was all set for tooling around the neighborhood. But what if I crashed and scratched my face? Or broke my leg and couldn’t walk down the runway? I went on the ride anyway, but I’m embarrassed to admit I hesitated before setting out.

Do celebrities—real fashion models, actors, TV news anchors, etc.—live their lives under a cloud of worry over their appearance? Do they forgo work and fun in fear of disturbing their perfection? If so, what constricted lives they must lead.

In my first post I related buying a classic pantsuit for the modeling competition. The clerk who rang up my purchase was one of those impossibly gorgeous young women who inspire speculation over their off-duty gig. I told her I was participating in her store’s older-woman fashion search and asked her what she thought of the pantsuit. I said I actually preferred funkier clothes and described an alternate outfit consisting of pieces I already own: a short bias-cut brown skirt, long top with a wide, big-buckled woven belt over it, vintage orange denim jacket and high, sling-back heels. Which outfit did she think the judges would like better—classic or funk? She said my own clothes would be better because I would stand out. She thought everyone would wear something similar to the liz claiborne suit.

So what to wear? Back home I tried on the new outfit. It was nice but so ordinary, so career-woman businesslike. I experimented with several combinations from my closet but finally settled on the new liz pants with a favorite old shirt, lots of dangly necklaces and flats. It’s the outfit in the photo. My husband took the picture right before I left for the contest. I would be comfortable if not particularly splashy. Of course, my husband said the gold chains looked like something an aging male wannabe disco dancer would wear nestled in his chest hair. Thanks so much, sweetheart, for the vote of confidence.

Saturday morning, the day of the contest, I was fairly calm—more nervous, really, about finding parking in downtown Seattle than I was about the competition. I usually take the bus when I go downtown, but today I didn’t want to work up a sweat walking to the bus stop. It turned out there was a parking structure directly across the street from Macy’s, which I luckily drove straight to without circling around and around the block looking for a space. It cost $12 to park, but oh well, it was a special day.

The doors were supposed to open at 10:00 a.m., but when I arrived at the third floor Stewart Street Room right on time, there was already a humongous line doubled back on itself down the hall. Each semifinalist was allowed to bring one guest for support, and the crowd was abuzz with excitement. And, boy, was the beautiful salesclerk wrong! Never before had I seen such an astonishing collection of fashion statements—everything from beachwear (no bikinis but clamdiggers and tube tops) to flowing flowered dresses dripping with ruffles and bows that I could picture a southern lady wearing on the verandah while sipping a mint julep. One woman sported one of those gigantic picture hats with a three-foot brim. Another looked as though she’d borrowed her granddaughter’s rave clothes. There might have been three classic suits.

It took a long time to check in. We were each given a number printed on a plastic sheet to identify us for the judges. Mine was 69. I did not take that to be an auspicious sign. The contestants took advantage of the long wait to consume the fruit, cheese, cookies and beverages provided and compare personal histories and their reasons for and expectations of signing up for the fashion show. One woman asked if anyone else had had any disasters while preparing for the competition. While choosing her outfit, she couldn’t see herself from head to toe in her mirror. She had a different shoe on each foot and wanted to see which one looked best with her skirt, so she stood on the toilet seat in her bathroom. Yes, you guessed it, she fell into the bathtub, ineffectually scrabbling at the towel rack on the way down. She bruised her backside but fortunately was not seriously injured. She was more worried about the skirt than getting hurt. A waffle-shaped soap scum design was printed on it from the bath mat, and she was afraid the imprint would prevent her from returning the skirt to the store. The accident convinced her it was not the thing to wear to the competition. Some blotting and a blow dryer rendered the skirt returnable.

Once we were all seated around the ominous, looming runway, the Macy’s event coordinator greeted the 137 semifinalists and their support groupies and introduced the judges: herself, her assistant and a talent scout from the TCM Modeling Agency. She asked for a show of hands of all the contestants who were in their 50s. Maybe 60 to 75 percent of the women raised their hands. Then in their 60s—a few dozen, including me. 70s—maybe six or eight. 80s—I think I counted three. 90s—yes! There was one woman who was 93. The coordinator read one of the essays we were all required to submit to be chosen as semifinalists. She said it represented the theme a good many of us had expressed—being grateful for the time, now that we were older and had paid our dues by raising families and working at careers, to pursue our own personal dreams.

Then, on to the competition. What brave women! Attempting to be something we’re not with grace and style. Trying to be different, moving down the runway in a unique way with that little extra flair that makes someone a winner. Some women removed a jacket and flung it over their shoulder, occasionally hitting themselves in the face in the process. A few untied long scarves from around their necks and twirled them in the air. One woman pulled off a hat to reveal blond curls that cascaded to her waist. Some women walked with elegance, some had a sexy walk, some bouncy and, yes, some were awkward and clunky. But the audience supported everyone, no matter how clumsy, with enthusiastic applause. And when the 93-year-old woman took her turn, slightly tottery but game, she was rewarded with a standing ovation. Really, it brought a tear to my eye.

My group was called to line up before the stairs leading to the runway. I had been having a great time grinning maniacally at the women who had gone before me and clapping for them hard enough to make my palms sting. I didn’t think I was especially nervous, though I had noted that my upper lip was trembling when I’d reapplied my lipstick earlier, but now as I approached the runway, my smile began to fade. Practicing my walk at home, I’d decided to adopt the strong stride I’d seen the contestants in the Miss F.A.T. (Fabulous And Thick) beauty contest I’d watched on TV use rather than the mincing, one-foot-directly-in-front-of-the-other gait that couture models employ. I’d planned to take a couple of turns in the middle of the runway and in front of the judges’ table, maximizing my few moments of fame, but once I was up the stairs I shot down the runway as though I were racewalking. I was back in my seat, finished before I’d realized I’d even begun. The woman sitting next to me, who’d done a near-professional job of modeling early on, asked me, "Did you have fun?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Well, that’s all that counts, then." I should have practiced more.

So, I wasn’t chosen as one of the 15 finalists. I won’t get to model in the fashion show in October, though I do plan to enjoy the consolation gift of a complimentary facial massage from Shiseido, one of the Better With Time sponsors. My brief fashion career is over. I’ll have to go back to just being a writer. You can check out my books at http://www.linda-wallace.com.

My beautiful, almost-professional seatmate wasn’t chosen, either. In fact, looking at the winners, it was hard to determine what criteria the judges had used for their decisions other than picking the 93-year-old who was so clearly special. I wonder if I’d ignored the lovely salesclerk’s advice and worn my classic pantsuit I would have had a better chance. Maybe I would have stood out more and won. Maybe.

Better With Time Fashion Model

2006-08-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, 149 other semifinalists and I will stride down the runway to compete in the Seattle Macy’s Better With Time Modeling Contest for women 50 and older. Fifteen finalists will be chosen by a panel of judges from Macy’s merchandising and advertising departments and from the Seattle fashion community. The lucky winners will model in the Better With Time Fashion Show in October.

In the preliminary competition we were each required to write a 250 word essay and submit a photo—mine is the one posted here. My sister took it when we traveled to Newport Beach, CA, for my daughter’s wedding. The photographer cut the top of my head off, but I still made it through the first round of applications. Some of you, perhaps most, are now thinking it would have been much better if she’d lopped off my entire head. Too unkind.

It’s a real kick to get a chance to model at the ripe-old-age of 60. When I was a pudgy, bespectacled preteen, I spent hours fantasizing about glamorous photo shoots. I poured over Seventeen imagining myself in all the cutest outfits. Never mind that I wore a size 14 and my grandmother made most of my clothes—puffy cotton print skirts with gathered waistbands and color-coordinated cotton blouses. My mother made me add a pair of corduroy pants under the skirt in January along with an obligatory sweater or two. Winters were cold in Missouri. If someone had told that girl she was going to have to wait until she was middle-aged to audition for a fashion show, she would have been devastated.

Two magazines I’ve read this August have also featured older women in conjunction with style and fashion. Vogue’s cover reads, "Style Secrets From 20 to 93, Dressing Your Age." And sure enough, women representing each decade swan about in gorgeous clothes on the inside glossy pages. Prestigious women, too: Ellen Barkin 52, Nora Ephron 65, Yoko Ono 73, Robin Chandler Duke 82 and Babs Simpson 93. Who could ever have imagined Yoko would make 70? And in cutoff jeans, gloves, tights and high heels? Most of the pieces are interviews, but Nora Ephron writes her own essay, an excerpt from I Feel Bad About My Neck. She is not at all happy about getting older. She will definitely not go gently into that good night.

The other magazine with aging models is AARP. Not surprising, right? The five winners of the Faces of 50+ Real People Model Search were, according to the magazine, "…whisked to New York to appear in ‘Fall Style’…where they got in touch with their inner Armani." AARP’s models included two men. And a $498 sweater by Faconnable paired with $40 Target boots.

I debated at length over whether I should buy new clothes for the audition or wear something I already own. I put off the decision until today when I suddenly rushed to Macy’s to shop. It seemed only fair to reward the store execs in some way for giving me an opportunity to become a fashion diva. I picked out a classy but conservative liz clairborne pantsuit, a size eight, the six was the tiniest bit too snug—my preteen self would have been so envious. In the fitting room I took advantage of those mirrors that show you on all sides to practice my audition poses. I didn’t think I looked too bad, only a little dopey; however, I also noticed when I was changing from one outfit to another that the flesh on my back and belly hung down in folds in a manner remarkably similar to a Shar Pei’s. Sigh. Maybe Nora Ephron is on the right track after all.

Here is my 250-word contest essay. I’ll let you know next week if I’m chosen as one of the fifteen finalists for the fall fashion show.

Better With Time
I’m a sassy, sizzling sixty with the time and self-confidence to enjoy life and style. Try a new look? Why not? Now I have no boss or clients I’m required to impress. If it doesn’t work, it was fun to see myself in a new guise.

I can take the same light-hearted approach to how I use my time. Weight lifting? Sure. Wow, see that biceps definition! Yoga? Can’t do the Wheel yet, but Downward-facing Dog is a snap. Walking? Love it! An hour five days a week keeps my blood pressure and weight down and my health prescription free. Then for a dash of spice, throw in a little biking and swimming.

And speaking of spice, a lifelong passion for reading has segued into writing fiction with two published romances, Special Delivery and Big Bad Wolfe, both released by Wings ePress, and a just-completed mystery tentatively titled Touch of the Devil. Techno-phobia? Not allowed! I designed and maintain a Web site, www.linda-wallace.com, to reach out to my readers.

Volunteering warms my heart and allows me to give back to the community that nourishes me. A love for gardening has blossomed into grubbing Himalayan blackberry and ripping out English ivy in our parks and forests as a Washington Native Plant Steward. I’ve grappled with the mysteries of the compass with Boy Scouts and braved an icy plunge into snow-fed streams at Girls Camp. An old lady? No way! Life does definitely get better with an accumulation of wisdom and years.