When I was fourteen and babysitting for my brother’s kids, a small brown bat came down the chimney in his living room and sat there stunned, in the cold empty hearth.  It was late...

The bathroom scale was not my friend last week.  I had gone for a long time without getting on it and when I finally did, I was convinced it must be wrong.  I remember...

The Grand Coulee Dam is ninety miles west of where we live. We’d passed it plenty of times, even gawked at it up close yet had never taken a tour. I decided it was...

My husband does not like to plan ahead.  He loves to quote the old military saying, “to plan ahead is to plan twice”. I learned this a few hours after we were married —...

I called our cat this morning and wondered why it is that cats all seem to respond to “kitty, kitty, kitty”.  People who speak other languages — how do they call their cats? In...

While living in Texas in the 1980’s, we happened upon a local restaurant called Tom and Joe’s. It was typical diner fare:  burgers and fries, chef salads, malts, milkshakes and more.  It was fun...

I spend a lot of time in hot water.  Literally. I lie in the bathtub every morning and in the hot tub each night.  The thing that’s important is that I lie or float...

Our house is close to a highway.  This kind of just happened.  We moved here and needed a place to live.  The people who owned the house had moved to Alaska and desperately needed...

I love Facebook.  I know a lot of people who think it dangerous, too time consuming, prohibitive of real relationships, addictive and more.  It may be all those things. Yet I adore Facebook.  Because...

When I was eleven, a chicken farmer in our small town claimed he’d been visited by extraterrestrials. Through pantomime they asked for water and in return gifted him with three burned pancakes, one of...