Month: December 2016

2016 Retrospective

Posted on by Annie

For the last several years, I’ve kept a wooden bowl in my house, where I deposit receipts, papers, trinkets, and sea shells and sea glass throughout the year. And then on the last day of the year, I take them all out and sort through them, remembering the good and the bad, the hard things, and the wonderful things, that happened. It’s time for the 2016 edition. There’s no way around the hardest thing, the one that has colored the rest of my year: 2016 was the year my Dad died. So many times this year, I have wanted to…

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Sunday Serenity: Purples Haze

Posted on by Annie

With a lot of the US caught in the polar vortex and seeing seriously cold and snowy weather, I thought that sharing my favorite purple flowers might soothe souls and share the promise of springs to come, however far away that feels today.       Only 91 days till Spring! You can keep count using this webpage, which might help during the rest of the winter storms that must be endured.

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The Path to Less Stuff

Posted on by Annie

When people find out that everything I own is in my trailer or car, they just stare at me, then at the trailer. I get it, really, I do. That trailer seems small and the car is a Subaru Outback, not a big van or pickup truck. So then the next question is often “How did you do it?” I started paring down my possessions to fit into the trailer two years before, although I didn’t know at the time that I was going to end up in an Alto trailer full-time. I just felt like I had too much…

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Sunday Serenity: Home

Posted on by Annie

Sometimes serenity isn’t in the wild places or the newly discovered ones. Sometimes you find it in the old familiar places. Sometimes you find it at home. When I first moved to Santa Cruz from Boston, way back in 2000, this was the beach closest to my house. New Brighton became the place I could both lose myself and find myself as I figured out how to establish myself in a new job and a new life. After a year and a half, I moved a mile south to a rental house, and Rio del Mar and Seacliff beaches became…

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