I love the winter season here on Orcas Island because everything changes – not just externally, but especially internally. Life goes from constant outdoor gardening and athleticism in the sunny summer to indoor creative proliferation and exponential educational explosiveness in the brisk, perma-gray winter. Our younger son has listened continuously …
It’s Christmas Eve and we’ve just left a wonderful dinner at our friends’ house. It’s an hour before a beautiful candlelight service at our church and I’m sitting on my cold bathroom floor in front of the wall heater. Our kids have asked me repeatedly if I’d get the pickle …
As we near the end of the year, I am reminded of my worst parenting experience. Two years ago on December 29th, after hearing that the road going up to our highest point on the island – Mt Constitution – was closed due to snow, I decided to take the …
Here on Orcas Island we have several school choices, plus the option of homeschooling. Our family has done a random mix of things, based on what seemed best for each year. Our older son and I were sitting at the kitchen table learning about the Presidents a couple years ago …
We Orcas Islanders know how to celebrate. And we never go hungry either. Last Saturday I put a list of six events for us to go to in my pocket. That was just one day’s events. So far in the last three weeks, we have been to the Holiday Artisan …
He can’t eat. He can’t sleep. Sometimes he can’t think about anything else. He daydreams about all the time he wants to spend with her and all the things they’ll do together – the fantasies they’ll dream up, the worlds they’ll traverse. We go on a family walk together but …
Yesterday morning I dropped the kids off at school at 8 AM, drove to the ferry landing to sit the required half-hour in line, crossed the ocean for an hour and a half – with a stop for more travelers on Shaw Island – then drove another 45 minutes from …
One of the unique things about living on Orcas Island is that the power can go out unexpectedly. It happens a few times each year, which is why we all have back-up wood and dozens of candles for light. When it happens, it’s an immediate halt to whatever we may …
Time slows down the minute you get in line to wait for the ferry to the island Natural beauty surrounds you wherever you are Long, winding roads through the forest lead to beautiful harbors and docks The community genuinely cares about each other All your errands can be done within …
Moving from Santa Barbara, California, to the San Juan Islands off the northern coast of Washington State gave us one of the biggest changes we coastal Californians had ever experienced – seasons! While summer here is sunny, stunningly beautiful, and very external, fall and winter bring a very palpable internal …
Step out of your door and you will see and hear animals everywhere you go here on Orcas Island. Deer amble through your front yard. Quail peck through your neighbor’s grass. Eagles soar above (with a call more appropriate for geriatric chickadees), and crows and ravens caw and glurb to each …
I couldn’t let another year go by without capturing one of our island’s festivities that sets it apart from everything else in mainland USA. Down the forested, aptly-named Haven Road sits the Oddfellows Hall, overhanging the ocean and glittering inside with year-round fairy lights and huge paper lanterns. Every year …
“It’s ridiculous how much I love my life,” Maura Lynn says, as she’s picking colorful pumpkins and squashes from their vines and piling them into a wheelbarrow. Our younger son and I had chosen this particular fall-y-feeling morning to take her up on her offer to visit the farm where …
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