Presence

Home Base and Motherly Whiplash

September 12, 2026

I love my kids.

(Hopefully kind of obvious,  but saying it anyway.)

I love how they’ve grown and how they are living their lives. My youngest arrived in Japan earlier this week to study for a semester there. Luckily it is a situation where all the students at the school have their own single rooms and private bathrooms. The toilets are tiny, but they have bidets! Apparently the dorm room beds are not exactly soft and squishy—more futon-like—but so far sleep has come and everything is going fine. Good news indeed.

View from the dorm room balcony in Japan. And hey! The dorm room has a balcony!

My oldest is finishing up a few more weeks as a tour guide for a company that runs duck boat tours in Ketchikan, Alaska. She stands at the front of the duck boat and talks about the  town as the boat motors along city streets, and then shares facts about sea life and tries to spot whales and seals when the boat finally enters the water.

This child graduated from college a few years ago with a degree in environmental studies, but realized after her first few internships that if you wanted to make money in her field, you might have to go back to school to earn not only a master’s degree but possibly a PhD. Folks she worked with almost all had master’s degrees and were mostly serving as glorified volunteers. In one of her internships, the job included housing, meals, and air travel to and from their workplace (which happened to be Costa Rica, working with sea turtles, so that part was awesome), but not much else.

So she pivoted and has spent the last few years working seasonal jobs that provided discounted housing in touristy areas, a solid hourly wage, and sometimes even tips. She traveled through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand last year and returned stateside to work on the duck boat this summer. She will head to Breckenridge, Colorado, for a job this winter. She already bought a discounted ski pass.

They are out in the world, living their lives, and I am in my house missing them. It is a kind of whiplash to have them here for a time—maybe days, sometimes weeks or months—and then have them gone again. It happens so quickly. Earlier this week, my youngest set an alarm for 2:00 am and woke me up (because I had set my alarm for 2:03 am). We departed for the Reno airport by 2:30 am and arrived a little before 4:00 am. We checked two suitcases, made our way over to the security area that was reserved only for ticketed passengers, and hugged goodbye. I was home by a little before 6:00 am and happily went back to sleep for a few hours.

The house is quiet again—just Biscuit and me.

It’s a season for the comings and goings of my beloveds.

I am lucky to provide a space where they can land between their adventures. I am glad that my parents also provided this for me. I set out into the world after college, traveling some and living in different places, but when things fell apart, when one boyfriend turned out to be not so good, I had a place to come home to. I have friends who did not have this luxury. When they reached a certain age, they had to find work and a way to support themselves outside of the family home. Legally, children as young as 18 can sometimes be expected to make their way into the world on their own. With how expensive things are now, this seems nearly impossible. Still, it’s often the law. Continue Reading…

Security

Life in Fire Country

August 15, 2026

 

We could see smoke from a recent nearby fire in our backyard. Note the teeny fire plane toward the top of the photo.

We live in fire country, and maybe it has always been this way, a little. But now “fire season” has officially entered my vocabulary as the fifth season of the year. It ushers itself in, sometimes as early as May, and can linger through November, maybe even into early December, if the rains take a long time to arrive

I grew up in this area and knew that fires were a possibility when I was young, but not like this. There was a string of fires near my home back in the 1970s, but they were minor and eventually authorities figured out that they were started by a local firefighter who needed work.

Also, my parents never seemed to worry about their homeowners insurance or how much it would go up every year, something that regularly concerns me. They never thought that their fire insurance might suddenly be canceled, which has happened to many homeowners in our area. This, perhaps, is my biggest homeowner fear of all. I see folks flocking to our local community Facebook pages to ask if anyone has information about insurance companies that might possibly write them new policies. Many of them end up on the California FAIR Plan, which “provides basic fire insurance coverage for high-risk properties when traditional insurance companies will not.” The FAIR Plan website itself admits that it is “an insurer of last resort.”

My homeowners insurance recently renewed for another year. I am eternally grateful that my insurance company, State Farm, has continued to insure my home, even though it is in a wildfire prone area. It was luck, basically, that my mom worked in a State Farm office before she married my dad and was loyal to the company throughout her life. This meant that my sister and I used State Farm as well, since we almost always did what my mom recommended when it came to adulting types of things—like car insurance and, eventually, homeowners insurance, too. What if she had worked at a different insurance company before marriage? Almost every other insurance company in our area started canceling all their homeowners policies years ago. Continue Reading…