this one was easy. ben and i went camping with friends Dan and Emily (and new friends Dani and Becky!) we went for a hike in the last hour before sunset and the light was that amazing gold color, and everything is so green from the early winter rains. this is my favorite color: the color of yellow sunlight shining through green leaves.

pictured: 3 pairs of Asics GT-2×00 running sneakers, women’s size 9. not pictured: 3 more pairs i have at home. each pair can take about 400 miles before it needs to be retired to “backup sneaker” status. this picture represents about 1200 miles, or a year and a half in my running life.

Spot Coffee was one of my favorite things from the year I spent in Buffalo. That was 10 years ago. I wonder if it has weathered the recession?Mug pictured here with the ginger chocolate cookies: that Carrie and I made last weekend.

the race bibs are the inspirational background for this photo, but the intended focus is the scrap of paper in the center that says “Good Luck! 26.2” it’s an anonymous note that someone left under the windshield wiper on my car the night before my first marathon. to this day i have no idea if someone i know walked by and recognized my car, or just the fact that i was parked on a city street not far from the race expo caused a stranger to assume i was running the marathon. but it warmed my heart. random acts of kindness? pretty inspiring.

fall foliage, along with dunkin’ donuts coffee, is one of the key elements missing from bay area living. i had to go to kentucky (last weekend) for this shot of fall foliage. i took this looking down from the lodge balcony, so the grey-blue background is not sky, but sky reflected in the lake.

i make Art-with-a-capital-A for a living all day, but this i chose this photo because it’s 180 degrees from what i do. i like it because Art is such an all-encompassing term. i have composed my entire life around the plays that i make. this person risks his physical safety to tag a building from the railroad tracks in the middle of the night. i’d say both are gutsy moves.

my sister-in-law, Teresa, and my future nephew, Bode.

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Teresa: “We’re thinking abut naming your baby brother Bode. what do you think?
Geneva (3 yrs old): “How about Stinky?”

my grandfather’s remington portable, circa 1923. this typewriter’s main claim to fame, according to family lore anyway, is that my grandfather composed some of the original Red Skelton radio episodes on it.

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my father’s father died before i was born, and it is my mother who has kept stories of Grandpa Gordon alive so that my brothers and i had some sense of who our grandfather was. the son of swedish immigrants, traveling salesman, radio announcer, perpetually poor, infinitely big-hearted, fond of malapropisms and word play. he was my grandmother’s second husband, the hometown boy she married after the elopement with her sailor beau at age 17 didn’t work out exactly as planned.

when i dug this typewriter out of the back of a closet in my parents’ house a few years ago, i finally found the family resemblance between myself and this son of swedish immigrants. realizing that he and i were both writers gave me the same shiver of recognition as discovering that my niece and i have the very same hair color. though my mother is also a fine writer and i resemble her in many ways, i like to think that maybe my love for the written word came from my father’s side instead. it would give me something besides my funny, mangled swedish last name and my red hair/pale skin to connect me to this missing part of my family.

The boy that I love and freshly-baked biscuits. Not pictured: pot of homemade corn chowder on the stove and a chilly, rainy fall night.