Loose Leaf Notes

The Pacific Beach hotel we’re staying at is a photographer’s dream with blooming bird of paradise, mandarin ducks, koi fish, and bright red and turquoise parrots to photograph, not to mention Joe’s hour-and-a-half presentation on mindfulness at the Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth conference, which I also videotaped clips of.   The upside [...]

  Jockey’s Ridge State Park in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, has the largest natural sand dunes on the east coast.  Watch a video HERE.

My daughter-in-law left me a Facebook message on Monday saying that our two-year old grandson Bryce woke up in the morning and asked, “Opa come see me?”   That was hard to resist, so Opa (my husband Joe) and I set up a play date to take Bryce out for some fun.   Once down the mountain, [...]

Between the gusting wind, the sudsy surf balls scattering like tumbleweed, the drop-off dune incline down to the shore on one side, and the in-and-out of crashing of surf on the other, Joe and I were nearly bowled over at the beach on Assateague Island National Seashore. Landing from the 6 hour drive from the [...]

The following are Facebook messages that many of us in Floyd are following. They are the direct comments of our friend Asa, who arrived in Haiti last Tuesday to volunteer with Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team (AMURT), an organization that works around the world providing support in the form of education, health care, and shelter [...]

The island was known as Noepe, “land amid the streams,” by the Wampanoag Indians who inhabited it (still do). “Martha’s Vineyard” is said to have been named in 1602 by English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold for his daughter and the island’s wild grapes. It was called Martin’s Vineyard (most likely after Gosnold ship’s captain, John Martin) [...]

A tour of the gingerbread cottages in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard is like walking into a storybook. The perfectly preserved and elaborately decorated cottages were built in the mid 1800′s as part of a Methodist summer campground. Tucked away in the middle of town and entered through a downtown alleyway, many of the more than [...]

Our trip up to Hull, Massachusetts, for a family cookout and to take my mother to Martha’s Vineyard was planned as a mix of vacation and networking for the meditation retreats that my husband Joe runs. It became a tour of carousels when, after an exquisite Irish dinner of “bangers and mash” and Guinness, we [...]

Flying above a white wonderland with a crook in my neck from dreaming too far to the left, I’m trying to discern between the snow-peaked mountainous terrain and the clouds. This fairy tale is set above Lapland. The sound of the plane engine is like an ogre snoring. Looking out at the red tipped wing [...]

I found my poetry on Siesta Key, on the pastel petite shell shore where the tourmaline gulf water turns confectionary white sand to mocha gray. The gulls are greedy. The scent of salty breeze is of kelp. Sifting through the finely ground out-of-this-world white powder, I look but cannot find the slightest pebble. Occasionally I [...]

Riding bikes in the neighborhood, Joe calls out, “Here’s another fountain. Do you want to stop and get a picture?” Pulling my bike up on the sidewalk to gawk, I answer,” No, I just want to see what that guy has between his legs!” “Stand here; it matches your beret,” Joe says, snapping a picture. [...]

1. In the land of ‘Fireworks for Sale’ and palm trees I say to Joe: Now this is why we go on vacation so I can read Eckhart Tolle in Denny’s, sleep in a treehouse, and pull over on the side of the road and pick an orange from a tree. 2. Under an Orlando [...]

In 1982, a troupe of young street performers mixed with the crowd of tourists, artists and collectors in Baie-Saint-Paul, the Mecca of Quebec painters … Walking on stilts, the entertainers juggled and breathed fire. Inspired by the vacationers’ obvious delight, the performers organized the Baie-Saint-Paul entertainer’s festival, where the public witnessed the beginning of what [...]

Aka: The Saugus Saga I. One of my brothers is going through a divorce and his finances have been challenged because of it. When I first saw him during my ten day visit with my family in Hull, I remarked at how much weight he had lost. “I call it the ‘I can’t afford to [...]

The beach is my new religion. Baptized in the ocean’s holy water, I worship at sunset under a big sky. At the shoreline I’m humbled, in the name of the sand, sun, and sea. Post note: The sandpipers were too hard to videotape so I made a movie of THIS.

New York City from the sky in broad daylight looks like the set of a Science Fiction movie. The island of concrete skyscrapers looming up from the earth at various heights is three times as wide as Boston and reminds me of a giant Giant’s Causeway, like the one in Northern Ireland. I find myself [...]

1. Mission accomplished. Joe and I have had so many false starts getting to the ocean this year. Finally we landed on Virginia Beach last Tuesday where we were warmly hosted to mix vacation time with some low key business meetings. With my recent ankle injury, I couldn’t walk the beach, but could limp to [...]