Busy Hands

  Part of writing about lives past is understanding the things people used in that time period. I’ve been very fortunate to come from a tradition where women passed their sewing tools and projects down through the centuries. My great-grandmother Martha Margaret...

Historic Plumbing Part II

I’m now a week into the portable outhouse in my backyard as I work getting the sewer pipes replaced. Using it brings back memories of YWCA camp in the Pennsylvania woods with wolf spiders in the corner and a black snake that liked to sun himself at 1:00 PM in path to...

Historic plumbing

My house is 105 years and I’m having a fatal breakdown with the sewer line. It must be 80 or 90 years old.  I know this because in 1913, a photographer, I think Sanderson, flew over Sehome Hill in a balloon and took a picture of the neighborhood. Going up the alley...

A Good Resource for Washington State History

I write both fiction and non-fiction. Three of my novels take place in the Pacific Northwest in three different time periods: mid-19th century, 1906 and 1935. Each story has its own culture, technology, politics and media. My characters deal with the time they live...

Getting Started– All Over Again

It’s been quite a while since my last post, but I have been learning the frameworks of a blog while I balance work at a museum and conduct research in my off hours on a 19th century bark. For a writer and for the subject of all things historical such a blog needs to...

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