You may wonder why there’s a pumpkin sitting on my fence post, pretending not to look out of place surrounded by palm trees and yucca and rocks.
Pumpkins are not native to the desert, but, hey, neither am I.
I put it there to remind myself (as if I’d forget) to buy candy for Halloween (peanut butter cups that I will eat because we don’t get many trick-or-treaters) and also of the fact that summer has come and gone and my favorite season _ fall _ is finally here.
Why do I need a reminder?
Five years ago, when my husband took a job that moved us from the coast of California, to a hill overlooking Las Vegas, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
[Read more…]

Sometimes I surprise myself by coming up with an idea that is so good it makes me sorry I didn’t think of it sooner.
Actually, in some cases, I probably did think of it sooner, but then I forgot about it until I thought of it again.
My husband and I like to joke that we never run out of things to say to each other because we can’t remember a word we say. It’s not as funny as it used to be.
Anyhow, back to my great idea. Wait. What was it? [Read more…]

What a difference a day can make. Yesterday, he was restless and cranky, needing something, anything to put him at ease. But nothing quite hit the spot.
Today, he’s content, at peace with the world, smiling in his sleep like the Mona Lisa, and sleeping, yes, like a baby.
That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re 1 month old, sleep like a baby. Henry is working on it. He hasn’t quite figured it out, but he will, at least by the time he’s a teenager. (Babies that you can’t get to sleep grow into teenagers that you can’t wake up.)
It takes time to figure stuff out. Especially when there is so much stuff to figure. [Read more…]

The waiting room was packed with people doing what we all do in waiting rooms: Waiting.
Some read. Some played with cell phones. Some engaged in not-so-private conversations the rest of us pretended not to hear.
Usually, when I wait, I read. But I forgot to bring a book. So instead of reading, I watched. [Read more…]

First, you make a sauce.
Long ago, when I was learning to cook, those five words would have sent me running to the phone to order pizza.
I got married at 21, had never boiled an egg. Cooking was the one chore my mother never let me try. Fine with me. I figured if I could read, I could cook. Isn’t that why God made cookbooks?
So at 21, I traded a wedding gift blender for “Joy of Cooking” and a fancy apron, because not only did I want to cook good, I wanted to look good doing it.
Yes, I was young.
Then I pulled back my hair, put on some Stevie Wonder and proceeded to peel, chop, dice, blend, beat, batter, bake, broil, steam, poach, saute, stir fry, spill, splash, butcher, burn and blaspheme pretty much everything I touched.
The apron went in the rag bag. The kitchen floor looked like scorched earth. My fingers were permanently scarred.
But slowly, over time, 20 years or so, I learned to cook. I’m not great, but I do all right. We never go hungry and I seldom feel a need to follow a recipe.
I still love cookbooks, but only for browsing. Whenever I get an urge to cook, I take one out, turn a few pages, and wait for the urge to pass.
Imagine my delight, while visiting my son and his wife and their 1-year-old, the Firecracker, when my daughter-in-law asked me to teach her how to make white chicken lasagna.
I’d made it for dinner one night and everybody liked it, even the Firecracker who rarely likes anything edible.
“He ate it!” she said. “You have to show me how to make it!”
Showing is lots more fun than telling. But I had to leave, so I promised to send instructions.  Here they are. It’s easy. [Read more…]

In the same way the Blue Ridge Mountains left their mark on my soul, Yosemite National Park lent a formative hand to the rearing of my children.
I will forever be indebted to rocks and rivers and dirt.
When I was a child in the Carolinas, a lifetime ago, people did not go camping. If they did, they didn’t talk about it.
I cannot imagine my mother pitching a tent in the dirt. I can’t  even imagine anyone having the nerve to suggest she should.
But we never needed to leave home to spend time with Mother Nature. We lived all year ’round in her back yard.
Like other Southern children, I grew up running barefoot through cow pastures and corn fields and a snake-infested forest called “the woods,” that doubled as my playground and my mother’s salvation. “Get out of here,” she’d say, “turn off that TV and go play in the woods!”
And so I did, summer, winter, spring or fall. My earliest memories are of moments I spent watching the sun melt like butter over Hogback Mountain; moonlight rippling on the creek at my grandparents’ farm; thunderheads billowing, lightning flashing; leaves changing colors, red and yellow, gold and brown, dancing on the wind as I would, if I could.
Children need to be fed _ body, mind and soul. My childhood was far from idyllic. But thanks to those mountains, it was a visual and mental and spiritual feast.
My children grew up in a different world, but one that was  just as beautiful as the one I had known. On the rocky coast of California’s foggy Monterey Peninsula, they waded in tide pools, laughed at sea lions and turned deep blue building sand castles on the beach.
But it was in Yosemite, I suspect, where they came to know what Wendell Berry called “The Peace of Wild Things.”
Their father, a fifth generation Californian, grew up camping in the park with his family every summer, and he insisted that his children would know it and love it in the same way that he did.
So we camped there for a week every summer, plus an occasional weekend in spring or fall, for almost 25 years.
The summer after he died of cancer, my children and I camped in the park on the reservation he’d booked for us a few months before he died.
While we were there, my youngest celebrated his 21st birthday and got a job that would allow him to spend the next year in the park, cleaning campground bathrooms and finally, running the ski shop.
In that year, he “grew up” to be the kind of man who would make his dad _ and his mom _ very proud. Yosemite, I believe, helped to heal him of his loss.
When he left home to work in the park, I rented a lake house in the Blue Ridge Mountains and spent a month reconnecting with the land I first called home.  And somehow those mountains helped to heal me, too.
Last week, my youngest and his wife took their 10-month-old (Randy, named for his late grandfather) to Yosemite to meet his “rock family” _ Glacier Point, Yosemite Falls, El Capitan and Half Dome.
When he’s older, Randy might climb those rocks with his dad, the way his dad once climbed them with his dad, too. But for now it was enough for him to make their acquaintance. Maybe someday, Lord willing, I can introduce him to the Blue Ridge.
We have a relationship, most of us, if we are lucky, with mountains and rivers and rocks and dirt that is as real and as lasting as anything we will ever know with flesh and blood.
Yosemite had a hand in helping raise my children. I’m counting on it to help raise my grandchildren, too.

What do dreams look like to someone born blind, who lives all his days in the dark?
If my brother as a child ever dreamed of playing football, he never talked about it to me.
He talked about other things. Cars, mostly. And speed. He couldn’t wait to learn to drive.
“Sister,” he’d say, that skinny little boy with laughing blue eyes and legs badly bent from cerebral palsy, “when I get my license, I’ll fly so fast the angels will run and hide their wings!”
I didn’t tell him he would never get a license. Joe was smart. He’d figure it out soon enough. Until then, why not let him dream?
By the time he was a teenager, he didn’t mention driving any more. That’s when he fell in love with radio. He listened to it day and night, any chance he got _ WAGY from Forest City, N.C.
“Sister,” he’d say, that pimply faced boy sporting a blond crew cut and swinging a shiny white cane, “when I’m old enough to get a job, I’m going to be a disc jockey on the radio!”
I didn’t tell him it would never happen. Like most things, he figured it out on his own. In the meantime, he got to dream.
Then somehow _ while I was off in California raising a family and working for newspaper _ Joe fell in love with football.
Actually, he fell in love with a woman, Tommie Jean, who was also blind, and a big Clemson fan. When they got married, he promised to love, honor, cherish and always pull for the Tigers.
They were married 10 years before he lost her to cancer. Now he pulls for the Tigers twice as hard in her behalf.
He never misses a game, thanks to his hero, Pete Yanity, the play-by-play voice on WSPA, Spartanburg, S.C.
“You love Pete Yanity more than you love me,” I say. Joe doesn’t answer, just grins.
Three years ago, after I spoke in Anderson, S.C. (where my column has long appeared in the Independent Mail, and people know about my brother and most other personal details of my life) my husband and I were invited to take Joe to his first Clemson game as guests of the president and his wife (Jim and Marcia Barker, not as Joe first thought, George and Laura Bush.) And Pete Yanity, bless him, invited us to stop by the broadcast booth to say hello.
Talk about a dream come true. Joe had so much fun I thought he’d start nagging me to take him again. But he didn’t. Maybe, with all he’s “seen” in life, he’s learned to take it as it comes.
I wish you could’ve seen him when I told him I was speaking in Anderson again (last week, at a fundraiser for AnMed Health Center) and we’d been invited to the Independent Mail’s box to see Clemson play Georgia Tech.
We picked him up at noon (he was ready at 5 a.m.) and he was wearing his Clemson shirt.
“Why are you wearing a Gamecocks shirt?” I said.
He grinned as he does when I tease him, but he touched the emblem on his shirt to be sure.
Before to the game, we were hurrying to the broadcast booth to say hello to Pete Yanity when we passed the “good luck” tradition that Clemson’s players always touch as they run down the hill into the stadium.
“Joe,” said my husband, “there’s Howard’s Rock.”
Joe reached out and sat for a moment _ a middle-aged man in a wheelchair, his face lit up like Christmas, ever so gently rubbing his hand over a rock.
Later, on the ride home, I would tell him he had played a part in Clemson’s 27-13 victory.
“I did?” he said.
“You brought them luck.”
He threw his head back to laugh and it sounded like angels running to hide their wings.
“Well,” he said, “glad to help.”

A week ago, I told myself that spring was here to stay, and I, for one, was ready for it.