I welcome the Lunar New Year with hopes that the snake will help me shed the things I no longer need or want and grow in new ways. 

Last evening Julia Cameron was signing books at Collected Works, a local favorite bookstore. I didn't go as I have attended her workshops several times before and have been writing the "morning pages" she advocates in her book The Artist's Way for 30 years.

Christmas stories and iconography are full of bright stars, yet there is comfort in the soft glow of the farolitos that dot the landscape and lead us gently to our destinations.

I have been contemplating gratitude. Grateful for my family, for my friends from across my life and across the country, and especially grateful these days for the warm and supportive community of neighbors we have here in Santa Fe.

It was as a graduate student in literature at the University of California San Diego that I came to understand the concept of a critique.

Reading about the restaurant's recent revival, I was the one who was both amused and proud of my young self on a long-ago night at Le Veau d'Or in New York.  

Bordeaux, with its elegant 18th buildings, open public squares, and bustling shopping streets, could not have been more different than the American West, nor more beguiling.

This week, trying to winnow down a file box overstuffed with my father's papers, I rediscovered a curious, heartwarming copy of Uncle Florry's will.

Class reunions are few and who knows when we might be together again. So we indulged our nostalgia and laughed.

When my prom date Charlie Holtz arrived at the door in a white sports coat, I was waiting in the living room wearing a pink spaghetti strap formal, the most beautiful dress I had ever owned.