The sweetest of them all...

potatoes that is...go HERE for soup heaven..

Falling leaves....

Sweet, sweet autumn...

you are my very favorite I do believe.

When we lived in south Texas it was what i missed the most...

there is only so much a scented candle and a pumpkin spice latte (I mean no disrespect Starbucks) can do for a girl.

But what nature wouldn't do for me...I had to make for myself.  

Now when I put my leaf garland up on my mantle in this lovely little valley in the corner of Washington state...it matches the beauty of what is happening outside.

So where ever you live...if you need a little more autumn in your life (and really, who doesn't) all you need is this:

-grocery bag cut into leaf shapes

-orange thread

-a clunky old sewing machine

Just push the "leaves" through the machine, taking time to go back and forth to create the "lines" of the leaf.  

Long live October...

A letter to my husband...

Dear Husband,
  I was just thinking about you today...you in your far away office, me in my cozy kitchen.  I had a burrito that knocked my socks off for lunch today.  You would have had your's with super hot sauce, minus the avocado, extra cilantro and inhaled it in about two bites to my 15 small ones.

I was thinking about the fact that you were on my mind as I was making my burrito.  You weren't here, I didn't need to prepare you any lunch but you have infiltrated my simplest of thoughts...like what to put on a burrito.

I know that in the beginning you had to work really hard to make me your girl.  Really hard.  I shouldn't have made you work so hard or wait so long.  Deal is I just didn't know that you were what I needed.  But I know now.  I am so very glad I didn't pass up this experience of being your partner in this life...that I said, "why yes I would like to eat breakfast with you every morning for as long as we both shall live, thank you very much."

We both have some serious deficits to our humaness...some areas to work on.  Just as you patiently waited all those years ago, you continue to patiently wait for me to craft a life of good...good to my husband...good to my kids...good to my loved ones...good to my friends and beyond.

You let me be enough in all my nowness...

You willingly experience all of it...just like you will eat my sweet potato soup tonight and not complain even though I know it isn't your favorite.

Maybe I should make you an apple pie as a sweet reward for all the "waiting" and the "patients" this life with me has accumulated.

I love your goodness my husband dear.  Come home and kiss me soon,

Your Wife

Harvest....

The time has come.
We harvested those beautiful, fat, round, delicious pumpkins we've been tending all year.

I will miss their orange glow when I look out over the garden from my kitchen window. They promised me autumn...and now it has come.

Where is focus....

So here's the deal.

I'm not great at taking pictures.

Nope. Really.  

I'm not. 

It just so happens that I take alot of pictures...

of anything that will stay still long enough for my camera to capture it. 

And then I edit the hell out of it...

and of course only keep the three out of five hundred that I like.

The thing about photography that is tricky is focus.

There are so many places for your lens to chose to focus on clearly. 

It just might not be the thing that you would like to have in focus for that particular photo.

For example...should the knife be clear, the counter top, the dough or the cinnamon and sugar?

I'm not great at getting the right thing in focus at the right time.

Not great at all.

I have a lot of blurry in my life.

Alot.

I wish I could throw out the not so great, blurry parts of my life sometimes like I do with my not so great, blurry photos.  

So many times it's just not that easy.  You can't.  

The real art here...in photography and LIFE...is to adjust what you are focusing on in the picture.

When you can't edit something from your life...it is there...for always.

Change the focus.

I would have to recommend focusing in on the cinnamon and sugar more often than the knife.