This blog-chain interview for writers and there work will tell you a little about what I'm working on in 2013.

Life is fragile. And temporary. Sometimes you barely get acquainted before death ends the story.

Trying to sell our dream house in a rotten real estate market has proved an emotional challenge. But since I've been blogging about this painful change, my feelings have altered. The mystery of transitions and transitioning.

Trying to sell our house means opening it up to the inspection of strangers. Some are actually shopping for a house. Others are just wandering through.

Being in the audience during a Glen Campbell Goodbye Concert was both heartbreaking and inspiring.

From early morning until well after dark, our wildlife neighbors enchant us.

In our search for buyers, we've turned our Victorian farmhouse into a model home (or if you like, a display home). While the rooms are beautiful and, I hope, inviting, they're not much fun to live in.

We designed our house to look and feel old-fashioned. Sweetheart found a way to add genuine American history to the living and dining rooms. So even though it was brand new when we moved in, parts of our home were very old.

Kenneth T. Jackson, in "Crabgrass Frontier," writes that porches "were places for observing the world, for meeting friends, for talking, for knitting, for shelling peas, for courting, and for half a hundred other activities."  I see our porch as one large welcome mat.

So much goes into making a house a home -- everything from the carefully-selected siding to the volumes filling bedroom bookshelves.