a moment in the day: sky

People are sharing pictures of the northern lights, again, on Facebook. I knew there was a possibility through some news story I popped into earlier in the day. Now, late, Stephen doing dishes, I go upstairs and click over to the NOAA Aurora 30-Minute Forecast tab I've had on my computer ever since May, the first time everyone in Oregon but me, it seemed, saw them. The map shows bright red—high chance—over a huge portion of the top of the country and Canada, cooling to a lime green—still some chance—as it dips into Oregon and over Portland.

I get a funny pang in my chest. This is just one more example of the ways my life has changed now that I don't have Nicholas in it anymore. I have no reason to go outside at the end of the night.

When I go back downstairs and mention the northern lights to Stephen, he says, sure, let's go look, and he takes his stocking cap and puts it over the backyard security light to keep us in darkness. I go and stand in the center of the yard. Look north over the neighbors' roof. The sky is nothing but clouds. 

a moment in the day: walk

Late afternoon on a mild October day, Stephen and I are taking a walk. The trees we pass are green, then orange, then red, then green again. 

"Want to go see the fairy garden?" he asks.

"Sure." We turn at the corner and keep going.

Taking a walk, or like last night, actually going out to a reading event, are things I didn't do much in these, the last months of Nicholas' life, as his eyes became cloudier, his body shakier, his separation anxiety all-consuming. Feels weird whenever I'm out of the house now.

There was something sacred about giving all my time to him at the end. And now, on the other side, a walk isn't just a walk; it's also not being needed anymore.

Everything is two things right now. Everything is the thing it is and also the thing it used to be. Turning the latch on the top lock of the back door—the rigidness under my fingers, then the give and the creak-clunk as it turns—is also me taking Nicholas out in the mornings. Getting up from my desk to cross the room to turn on, or off, the air conditioner is also looking for where he is on his little pile of pillows: is he asleep, is he awake, shall I get down there on the floor and give him a cuddle? Doing exercises late at night is also holding Nicholas to my chest instead of gripping hand weights as I do fifty squats, wondering what he thinks of bobbing up and down, up and down.

My history with Nicholas lives deep in my body, in all the tiny ways my body moves every day—turning over in bed, pouring a glass of water, stepping down the back steps.

Here's the fairy garden, suddenly, and Stephen and I stop to look. It's really just a house in the neighborhood where they've planted so many different types and colors of flowers that it looks kind of magical. Stephen points to a corner of the lawn and talks about how he saw the owners do some sort of special technique to get the formerly patchy grass to grow in quick and full. I think about Nicholas walking around our backyard in the tiny shoes I got him back in July when we had so many bees buzzing in the clover.

Everything is going to be two things for a while. And that's as it should be. I ask Stephen if he ever met the people who live here and if he ever told them he calls their yard a fairy garden. We look at the pretty flowers for a little longer and then we continue on our way.

Book cover: Sunshine Girl

I have loved working on the book cover for Nancy Townsley's upcoming novel Sunshine Girl, in part because Nancy is just such a lovely human being. When she first signed with Heliotrope Books, she mentioned to me that she'd like to have me design her cover, and I was hoping, but not expecting, because I assumed Heliotrope has their own designer or designers and doesn't usually use freelancers—but Nancy asked them and they said yes! It's been very nice collaborating with them and with Nancy.

To give you an idea of the book, here's the "elevator pitch" Nancy sent me when I was just getting started:

Sunshine Girl is a work of fiction that chronicles the evolution of the newspaper industry from Nixon to Biden through the lens of a multigenerational family saga.

Eliza Pearl learns the journalism trade from her father, who leads a rural Oregon newsroom. When he develops a mysteriously debilitating condition and flees to a healing center, Eliza and her mother move to Alaska to start fresh. After college, Eliza takes a job at Juneau’s largest daily, working for her father’s former protégé, Mina Breckenridge. Together they navigate sea changes in their industry: The rise of the Internet, the proliferation of social media, politicians’ “enemies of the people” accusations, the murders of journalists across the globe, and violent bloodshed closer to home. Trying to prove herself at The Empire, Eliza becomes obsessed with a feature story about charismatic parents whose adopted daughter is a flute prodigy, a story Mina inexplicably kills. As fact gets sifted from fiction, she uncovers a decades-old secret that threatens to upend her relationship with Mina and tarnish her memories of her father. Sunshine Girl, a page-turning tale of family secrets set in a world of truth-telling, explores the art of regional journalism through the lens of an intrepid reporter who discovers more than she expects—once she starts investigating her own life.

Nancy had a piece of artwork, painted by an artist friend, based on the book, that she said she'd like to use for the cover with perhaps different lettering.

The artist is Cindy Sullivan, and you can check her art out here.

I so understood why Nancy was interested in using this lovely personal piece of artwork that her friend had so generously gifted her, but I was worried that the tone might not be right for Nancy's book from a marketing standpoint. To me, the artwork felt light, whimsical. It made me think of a 1950s comedy film in which the plucky protagonist, wanting to be just like her reporter dad, decides to go out after a big scoop of her own. I'd kind of like to see that film, but I wasn't getting the sense of the more serious aspects of Nancy's book: the family secrets, the weighty topics Eliza covers in her work, her longing to connect with her father. I asked Nancy if she'd be open to my exploring other ideas, and she was totally game—which was great, because an idea was brimming.

I thought, what if we start with a newspaper or stack of newspapers, and the book title is emblazoned across it like a big headline. Then scattered on this newspaper are photos, the two main ones being of Eliza and Martin, her father. Eliza is looking away in one direction and Martin is looking away in the other. Perhaps keeping them separate as photos, turned away from each other, would introduce the separation that Cindy's artwork creates using the big book. 

Nancy and Naomi Rosenblatt of Heliotrope liked this idea, so I started tinkering. First step was to create our Eliza and Martin. I asked Nancy for a physical description of both and I also had her Google images and send me examples of people who might look like the characters.

It’s an honor to get to create the physical presence of a book's characters—an honor and responsibility. To depict them the way the author pictures them: Eliza's wavy, red hair, her expression, thoughtful, searching; Martin's beard and pipe, his determined eyes. The whole time I was piecing them together, I was worried about getting it wrong.

I used Adobe Illustrator to start creating them using simple lines.

Eliza...

And Martin...

My stack of newspapers started out the same way, as lines.

And then the lines turning solid.

One challenge/question I had was how detailed to make the newspaper. I wasn’t sure at first: did I want to create headlines and articles with actual text? Did I want to keep it impressionistic, just shapes and planes of color? Going impressionistic (for want of a better word) seemed smart. I didn't want any newspaper text to overshadow the title, author name, and blurb. I didn’t want any bit of the newspaper to overshadow our characters. Simple shapes of color seemed smartest to delineate my story columns, and I experimented with taking text and warping it in order to create my headline text. The latter wasn't completely successful, but I left it that way as I worked on building the rest of the design.

I experimented with placing my photos on the newspaper, and I created a press badge to add, to fill the space and to help cement the notion that the book is about journalists.

Once I had all my elements, I played around, created samples, sent them off, discussed the art back and forth with Nancy and Naomi. 

We went through loads of iterations with different changes, including the shape of the fake text, the name of the newspaper, the colorway. I tried a less-slanted newspaper for a sample and, on impulse, made one where I removed the photos and badge and put Eliza, big, front and center... or front and off-center. Both Nancy and Naomi were intrigued with the big Eliza and wanted to move forward with that layout. I wondered about somehow moving the blurb and adding back the photo of Martin behind her, and then I got a note from Nancy saying she had shared some samples with our mutual friend, publisher Laura Stanfill. Laura's thought about the big Eliza version was to want to put Martin back but as an image printed in the newspaper. Nancy loved this idea.

Originally, I had floated a concept in which Eliza and Martin were both pictures printed in the newspaper. We had decided against this because we worried it would make both characters seem like news stories rather than journalists—but maybe having Martin illustrated this way alone was doable because it wouldn't change the depiction of our protagonist. I shrank and shifted the details of the top of the newspaper so that I could fit the blurb above, and then I added Martin in the space where the blurb had been.  

Nancy also suggested a serif font instead of the sans serif I had been using, so I experimented with that. 

As we zeroed in on our design, I refined and added detail. And then at the very last minute, after we thought we had our finished cover, after I'd already packaged up the Illustrator file and sent it to Naomi to prep for the printing process, a thought occurred to me, something that had brushed across my consciousness here and there but that I'd never remembered to bring up. I emailed Nancy:

Oh oh! One thing I keep forgetting to ask about - and maybe you already told me? What color eyes do Eliza and Martin have?

I had originally made Martin's eyes blue because it worked well with the color scheme, and I'd gone with green for Eliza because it looked good with the red hair. How could I have been so careful to create both characters' physicalities and then assigned them eye color solely based on what I figured would look good in the design?

I got lucky. I was right. And we had a cover.

Sunshine Girl will be out on April 22, 2025. More info on Heliotrope books is here. More info on Nancy is here. And here's an excerpt.

*

The rain had started in earnest, falling fast and cold. The thoroughfare was so clogged with shoppers that Eliza nearly tripped over a figure crouching beside a newspaper box a block up the street. The box dispensed the Oregonian for seventy-five cents on weekdays, one dollar for the Sunday edition, according to the sign. The man moved copies of a tabloid-size paper from his bag to the asphalt, single copy by single copy.

He wore his hood up, partially obscuring his face.

“Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Eliza said, but Martin remained on his knees, facing the street. Blond-gray curls strayed out from the sides of his hood. She stayed a minute, observing him. He placed a brown tarp on the pavement and spread it out, laying papers on top to prevent them from getting wet. Tiny rivulets of water made their way through channels in the tarp’s brittle folds.

a moment in the day: nuts

Stephen's standing at the kitchen window looking out.

"Do you see it?" he asks. "Here on the gate and then over there on the fence?"

"What?" I come over.

"The piles of walnut shells from where the squirrels have been eating them."

I've been seeing them do that a lot lately. Sitting on their ledges, brown balls of fluff with their tails in jaunty question marks, gnawing at nuts over their little piles of refuse.  They seem industrious eaters at this time of year. Are they fattening up for winter? Or am I just looking forward to fall?

Me: "I don't see them."

Stephen, annoyed: "I keep having to brush the stuff off. They're leaving it everywhere."

Me, bemused: "You know that's just what squirrels do naturally."

Stephen: "It's gross."

I sidle in closer to him and now I see them. One on the low wooden top of the gate, and two more over there on the fence that separates our yard from our neighbor's. Funny, little piles of shell, almost perfectly shaped, as if art directed by tiny squirrel hands. The way our world is shared with these small beings gives me a happy, little pang in my chest.

Me: "Cute!"

Stephen: "Fuckers."

a moment in the day: picture

I'm sitting in a vintage dress on an antique chair in the early evening sun. Crouched in front of me, Eric aims the camera and fires off shots as Stephen, assisting, holds the big reflector, angling it so that its gold surface bounces sunlight across my face.

Something deeply ingrained says, who am I to be sitting here having my picture taken. 

Eric has been on a mission to photograph Portland writers and artists, treating them to long, intimate sessions behind his camera, capturing them with his magical eye. He says, "Let your neck relax. Picture yourself in an opium den."

Opium dens are, of course, not where anyone would picture me, but I'm giving myself over to everything he says this evening. I let my head loll against the back of the chair. He leans in and his camera goes ksh ksh ksh.

"Loosen your jaw," Stephen says. "You keep all your tension in your jaw."

I relax my chin, let my mouth open a bit. Something deeply ingrained says, don't open your mouth, you'll look slack-jawed and unintelligent. I don't know where to look, then remind myself I can look wherever I want. I glance to my right, I glance down, I glance to the camera. Ksh ksh ksh.

Eric pauses in his shots to check out what he's been getting and then he turns the camera backwards toward me. "Have a look at this." His enthusiasm is infectious and calming. It momentarily quiets the voices in me. I look into the viewfinder. My vision tunnels down into darkness and stops on a tiny, luminous image of me. It looks beautiful and I tell him so. 

Something deeply ingrained says, who am I to think an image of me is beautiful. 

Feels egocentric, feels like it must be a lie.

He turns the camera back around and the session continues. I settle back in the chair. Light from Stephen's reflector dances and winks.

Eric says, "Close your eyes."

I've been thinking lately about that thing you do where you look at an old picture of you from when you were younger and you think, if only I'd known how good I looked back then. If only I had appreciated it. That's a universal experience and it can happen at any age. Seventy-five, and you're looking back on your fifty-five-year-old self and saying, why didn't I appreciate it? Eighty-five and you're looking back on seventy-five. You know what would be nice? If we change that narrative: be fifty-five and make the active decision to look at and appreciate it now.

Eric says, "Open your eyes."

a moment in the day: animal hospital

Two in the morning at the emergency animal hospital is quiet. Not many people in the waiting area. There's the man with the Yorkie called Max and the woman with the cat named Halloween. And Stephen and me sitting side by side, Nicholas on my lap. The big TV screen on the wall is showing Bob Ross painting a mountain with the sound mostly off.

When we first got here during the eleven o'clock hour, it was noisier, Nicholas on my lap emitting a slow rhythm: a cry, then quiet, a cry, then quiet. He was agitated and his face was swollen and we were worried he was having an allergic reaction to something. But in the time we've been waiting here, he seems to have passed whatever reaction he was having to whatever it was. The swelling has gone down and he's not crying or agitated anymore. He curls on my lap mostly snoozing. We're at that point in the long emergency room night where you ask yourself whether you should have stayed home but you've been here long enough that it feels wrong to leave.

Max and his owner have been here since seven o'clock.

Bob Ross has been painting landscapes on the TV screen for three hours. There's a Bob Ross network, apparently? This late into the night, that fact feels kind of surreal. What is the purpose of the Bob Ross network? Is it expressly made for calming people in waiting rooms? Can individuals subscribe to the Bob Ross Network?

Time moves weirdly during the emergency room night. It feels like it moves both too fast and too slow. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint another mountain. I pet Nicholas. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint tree branches. I pet Nicholas. I stare into space. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint wave breaks in a seascape.

Now a sudden hot seep spreads across my lap under Nicholas. He's peeing. It's not a little tinkle but a wide Bob Ross seascape, and I'm too tired to really care. 

"Yeah," I say to Stephen, deadpan. "He's peeing."

As Stephen gets up to go after paper towels and call the front desk person for a clean up, I turn my eyes back to Bob Ross. It's going to be a long night.

Raising a glass to Peg

Today would have been my friend (since I was six) Peg's eightieth birthday. As a kid I always remembered it, of course, because it was the Fourth of July. This birthday is so bittersweet because she just left us all two short days ago. I'm still in that place where I don't quite believe it. When I want to honor someone, if only just for myself, whether it be for their passing or their birthday, I tend to search their name in my partially-digitized diary, looking for passages I can pull out and maybe share. or maybe just read through. Memories I've forgotten. I started doing that this morning, poking around through my computer, looking at little mentions of her, but then I ran out of time and had to get on the clock for work.

The other night, Stephen was telling me a special Peg memory of his, which he also shared on a loved one's post on Facebook today, about an evening when we had Peg over for dinner:

The three of us sat outside and had a lovely meal. When we asked her what wine she wanted to drink, she told us that she never drank wine in this country, that she only drank wine in Europe; she thought the wine you could get here was way inferior to what you could get there. So, no thank you! I got such a kick out of that; that was so HER.

I loved that little snippet of memory. And I mentioned it to my mom just now on the phone. And she told me that years ago, when she and my dad introduced Peg to Australian wine (we lived in Melbourne for a few years when I was very young), it was the same: Peg loved it so much she decided that she'd only want to drink Australian wine. 

Funny, when I got off the phone with Mom, I jumped back on my diary search, poking around my old journals and looking for Peg's name, and this came up. It's not a memory of Peg per se. It's Peg's memory of my dad. One that she shared in a long email thread I started back in 2020 after my dad died, wanting to collect stories about him. This was Peg's offering, and she told it because she was thinking about Dad, but I would like to share it, thinking about her. She said:

I have so many stories to share. My fondue story is one of them. It was the adults having fondue one evening. Everyone had left the table except Don and me. He had opened a bottle of Wynn’s Cabernet and he and I finished it off and maybe opened another. It was wonderful wine and I credit him with introducing me to its charms. He saved his last bottle of Wynn’s for my 40th birthday some years later because he remembered how much I loved it. I still have the empty bottle, even though you can hardly read the label.

Mara can tell you how I never stopped talking about that wine, to the point that she was compelled one Christmas to import a few bottles for me!

There are many more stories that show how much I loved that man. He was one of a kind and will never be forgotten.❤

I kind of love that sentence, "I credit him with introducing me to its charms." I love the whole passage because it's a memory of my dad and a memory of Peg, not to mention my lovely friend Mara, but also because it's so full of Peg's voice. Like she said about Dad, she was a one of a kind and never to be forgotten. And though I don't have any European wine or any Australian wine, and though I'm sipping on a two-hour-old peanut smoothie that's gloopy and half separated, I do raise a glass to her. A woman of class and grit and humor and a woman who knew what she liked. Like this other tiny memory I came across, from my diary back in 1985:

Of course the 2nd thing that made the day good was the Everly Brothers concert. It was really great. Let me see…what did they sing? “Bye Bye Love”, “Bird Dog”, “Kathy’s Clown”, “On the Wings of a Nightengale”, “Wake up Little Suzie”, “All I have to do is dream”, “Claudette”, “Be Bop alula”, Oh so much! And it was great! I got myself a t-shirt & a poster which is a collage of their albums & magazine covers. Peg got a copy of a tape that was a concert they did in ’83 which was very similar to ours.

We came home with the top of Dad’s convertible down and Peg’s tape blaring “Claudette”, “Bye Bye Love”, “Bird Dog” out of the speakers.