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Mornings With You

So many things didn’t work out on our 28th wedding anniversary, but not the morning. Never the morning. Maybe this is the secret of our marriage, I’ve never had high expectations. I married you because the thought of waking up with someone else undid me. I played this scenario out in my mind when we were young, when I tried to let you go, tried to date other guys. Nice guys who would make nice husbands. I’d get through dinner. A movie. Maybe even midnight, but how could I not wake up with you? I imagined meeting someone else. Marrying […]

By Paula February 27, 2017

We took in refugees

When it happened, I could hardly believe it, though we’d been preparing for days. Filling our cars with gas, stocking up on food and water, buying extra propane tanks. My dad is a civil engineer and his first job was helping build the Oroville Dam. “When it goes over that emergency spillway, the s#@* is going to hit the fan,” said Dad. “They should have concreted that wall long ago. They never did. It’s still dirt. When the water hits that dirt it’s going to begin eroding the hillside. It’s going to compromise the dam. We’re all in trouble now.” […]

By Paula February 23, 2017

If it floods…

If it floods… you will have a story. Hopefully a fierce, unforgettable story to share for the rest of your life. You will tell this story till you are old and gray, and then you will tell it even more because older people love stories. Oma and Opa nearly lost their lives after a Pineapple Express storm blew out a levee near their Yuba City homes on Christmas Eve night 1955. I’ve heard my parents’ flood stories a thousand times, and I never tire of them. Opa was lucky not to drown as the flood waters rushed through the darkness […]

By Paula February 13, 2017

Do you need a break from the Internet? Go grab some sky.

Perhaps the presidential election put me over the edge, but it was building before last November, this realization that the Internet might not be good for us. This reminds me of fourteen years ago when we gave up television because it felt like it was hurting our family. In a nutshell, our five-year-old son told another kindergartner at his school that his babysitter had kissed him and bit his lip. This other kindergartner went home and told her mother who told the police. Months of a child abuse investigation loomed over our family. Our son didn’t have a babysitter, so when questioned […]

By Paula February 6, 2017

Your choices hold signifigance

I remember the day we made the choice. Wood burning or gas. “You really should go with gas,” a friend counseled us. “You don’t want to be cutting wood for the rest of your life.” I thought about it for a hot second, and then told my dad, who was designing our new home, “We want a fireplace. We’re going with wood.” Of course wood. I’d grown up with a wood-burning stove. Our family cut wood my whole life. When we built our house over a decade ago, we wanted a fireplace, not a stove. This was a problem in […]

By Paula January 31, 2017

Being Stuck Might Not Be A Bad Thing

Last Sunday afternoon we got our truck stuck in the mud. Over ten inches of rain has fallen since the new year, leaving California a muddy mess. It’s been so long since we’ve had weather like this that we forgot what it’s like. All we wanted was a little wood to heat our house. And we ended up like this… My dad came out to help us and got his truck stuck too. The ground was like quick sand in the buttes. Getting the trucks out felt like a losing battle. We spent hours shoveling mud and moving the trucks one […]

By Paula January 23, 2017

Is Good Really Good Enough?

I’ve done some soul searching lately. Should I keep writing books? Am I really good enough to be an author? It’s been on my mind. A lot. This battle in my heart. A heaviness in my soul these past several weeks. Since I was eight years old, I’ve wanted to be an author, but now I’m just not sure I have what it takes to really cut the mustard at it. It all started when I read my Goodreads reviews on my first book. I confess I don’t know much about Goodreads, and didn’t even know I had reviews there […]

By Paula January 13, 2017