GRAY IS THE NEW BLACK - FREE EBOOK

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​I didn’t send out cards this year or last year or the year before … BUT I did recently put the eBook for GRAY IS THE NEW BLACK back online after a hiatus and for the next 10 days it’s FREE. It’s a New Year’s story—in that it begins with a foolhardy resolution to lose weight, rewind my metabolic age from 84 to 64, and get my husband to pay attention to me AND write a book that turned out to be about much more than I bargained on. Here’s the link.

I ended 2017 resolving not to resolve. I ended 2023 resolved to be kind and grateful, to myself, others, and the world and to stretch more than strive.

Here are a few things I've learned about myself since 2017:

• I don’t bounce anymore, I break.
• I like brushing my hair. This sounds silly right? I always thought it would take the curl out, but now that it’s so long, it feels great and I finally get the whole 100 strokes a day thing.
• My body—like my hair—has a set point, and dieting is simply counter-productive. My weight creeps or leaps back up to where it wants to be.
• I will write what I want, when I want, how I want.
• Every morning I wake up and know this life is a journey. Even if I don’t always appreciate where I land at day’s end, I hope it always is. 
• From all those hours on Zoom I learned that I enjoy talking to myself and it's even more enjoyable when I relax, smile, gesture with my hands and what not, and show genuine interest. It makes me seem like a nicer person, you know?
• I feel pretty darn good most of the time, so what’s the problem? Likely there isn’t one.
• I am enough. I was always enough. Just the way I am. 
• Despite my irritating insecurities, at my core I am a strong, independent-minded woman.
• I have been with men who felt threatened and emasculated by me and in their own distinct ways they have punished me for being who I am. This includes bosses and teachers.

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​I think it's likely my dad didn’t like me. I mean, he didn't like very many people, I didn’t always like him either, just as I don’t always like myself. I do, however, like who I am because of him, the parts of him that I find in myself. I imagine I wouldn’t be a writer if my father hadn’t been an artist. 

Perhaps I would be a happier, less unsettled person if I weren’t a writer or if I changed some other aspect of myself, but I can’t know that either. I can only know what it is to be me and for that, and for this life, I thank my father. Rest in peace, Dad. I’m sorry for being such a moody, broody kid. Thanks for this thick head of hair and these creative genes. We could have done far worse by each other.




​Mom died in December 2019, not knowing who or where she was. My sisters and I drove to Medford, Oregon to see her buried beside her parents, in accordance with her wishes—un-embalmed and in a plain pine casket. A lifelong romantic, forever searching for love and adventure in faraway lands, perhaps to her dying breath, her tombstone is engraved with the last three lines of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Happy New Year!!

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