About

I came of age in a small city in Washington (the real one), then relocated to the southeast United States for far longer than I expected. I always “planned” to return to my roots, just not the way it came about.

I am grandmother, hiker, writer, caregiver survivor, and expert on my own aging.

My public writing passion began in 2009, a blog on Blogger about the garden I was restoring at the renovated craftsman house I purchased on my own in North Carolina. And what the garden had to teach me about life.

In 2012, I left the garden and returned to my beloved Pacific Northwest. I moved into my childhood home with my 96-year-old mother to accompany her through her last years. Which turned out to be more years than I anticipated.

I switched blog topics, writing about living with my mother: the struggle, doubts, and complexities of caregiving and daughterhood—and the beacons of light. Following her death, at 102, I published the award-winning memoir, Mother Lode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver, the candid story of six years spent walking my mother home. I was 70 years old at the time of publication, ready to explore my own aging.

During the years with my mother, I practiced radical self care, often as a hiker in the wild places of Washington. My second memoir, Hiking Solo: Exploring a Life One Trail at a Time, is a search of the path to my solo life—defying the expectations I was raised with in the middle of the 20th century—while walking alone on the trail. Almost alone. Accompanied, as it turns out, by the spirit of my mother.

I live with my cat, Lena, in my childhood home in Southwest Washington—for now—where I’m currently conducting an archeological dig through the house into which my parents collected stuff for sixty-five years. I write on Substack now, about life in the third act, and what comes next.

Links to my writing:

Writing Down the Story, Act 3 (Substack: what was, what is, what may be to come)

Writing Down the Story (my WordPress blog predating Substack: home of nature writing)

My View from the Garden (archived blog)

I acknowledge that I live on the ancestral lands of the People of the Sands (Chi-ke-lis,) who thrived along the Upper and Lower Chehalis River, until the encroachment of white settlers forced them to give up their ancestral lands.