Beth Carpenter Books

Happy Solstice! AKA First Day of Summer Hanging Baskets It's officially summer, and while vacations are great, some of the best things about summer happen right here at home. As of today, we have nineteen hours and twenty-one minutes of daylight in Anchorage, and the other four and a half aren't really dark, so there's plenty of time for summer fun. Here are a few  of my favorite things about summer.  Summer Fruit Wildflowers Duckings, all in a row Reading on the Deck Sun Tea  And Roxy loves summer, too. Hope yours is just as joyful!

It's lilac time here in Anchorage. In yards all over the city, the bushes we ordinarily never notice are covered in floral plumes, diffusing their distinctive sweet scent that even smells purple. Lilacs spend fifty weeks a year as an ugly duckling, tall, scraggly, and awkward. It's a little like those old movies where the girl wears ugly glasses, baggy clothes, and pulls her hair back into a tight bun. But then one day Carey Grant removes her glasses, and says she has beautiful eyes. That's the budding phase of the lilac.  Then in the next scene, dressed for the ball, she's breathtakingly beautiful, sweeping the hero off his feet. And somewhere along the way, she gains confidence and grace and you know she'll never again be that ugly duckling. Now she's a graceful swan. And that's were the similarity ends. Lilacs live a long, long time, but they don't live happily ever after. Once they finish out their blooming cycle, they revert to the backgroun...

 It's summer again, and if it ever stops raining, I have work to do in my garden, and a mother's day gift of two new garden gnomes to introduce. I've been gardening on this lot for twenty-four years now, and over that time, the garden has changed and evolved. The former owner had established a perennial bed out front with globeflowers, campanella, cranesbill, and lilies. The lilies have started to fade away, but the others have self-seeded over the years, filling the bed, and I've added new flowers.  The one rhubarb plant in the backyard is now five huge clumps in different locations around the house. Ferns have multiplied to fill the shady spots. And there are more shady spots than ever, as the trees have grown and spread. Not long after we moved in, we build a fence, which created an awkward little pocket on the side of the house. I made that pocket my secret garden, a little private oasis filled with lacy foliage and pink and blue flowers, where I could escape an...

I recently had the pleasure of a visit with a remarkable woman. She has ninety-one years of experience on this earth, and seems to have lived each one fully. She showed me a map of all the places she and her husband traveled in their Airstream trailer, and it included every state except Hawaii and several places in Canada. Pictures and souvenirs of their life together cover the walls of her house. I asked her how a farm girl from Illinois happened to meet a boy from the Texas panhandle. It seems she was in St. Louis, working as a secretary for the Air Force (Army Air Corp then, I believe) and they needed a typist to accompany an investigation team to Amarillo. She was single, and so eligible to go. She went to check into the hotel for the first time in her life. In the lobby, a good-looking airman tried to strike up a conversation, but prudently, she wouldn’t give him her name. He convinced her to go to dinner across the street, though. She wasn't sure who he talked to, but he...

I’ve heard the best way to become a better writer is to write. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but writing the same thing over and over gets me nowhere. I need to hone my skills and try to get better with each book, each chapter. With this in mind, I’m always reading books, articles, and blogs on how to improve my writing. I often find lists of tips or rules. For example: Photo by Chance Agrella Ø       Never start with a dream sequence. Misleading your readers isn’t a good way to earn their trust. Ø       Amnesia is gimmicky, overdone, and unrealistic. Don’t use it. Ø       Let your reader get to know your main characters so that they will empathize with their struggles. I’ve just finished reading Dan Brown’s Inferno , and realized about 30% into the book he’d broken all three of these rules, as well as indulged in a little head hopping. We start off in a dream sequence, almost immediately r...

In our family, holidays tend to be a mix of tradition and new ideas, or at least variations on old ideas. Today, I’ve been preparing for Easter: making a pie, planning a menu, and dying eggs. I no longer have small children and no grandchildren yet, so nobody is too interested in dying eggs with me. I decided to try a natural dying method, which has the advantage of also saving a step. I hard-boiled these eggs as usual, but added the onion skins to the pan, purple in one and yellow in the other. I like the results. The colors are earthy rather than the customary pastel, but quite lovely. Surprisingly, the yellow onions seem to have more pigment, or at least dyed my eggs a much deeper color, than the purple. I’ll peel some of them tomorrow and make deviled eggs as an appetizer. There’s a certain irony to serving deviled eggs for Easter, but we can live with that. The rest of the eggs will probably appear in tuna salad later in the week, once the leftover turkey is gone. I’...

Last weekend I went on a woman’s retreat. Nine of us shared an unstructured two days in a cabin in a lovely little town in Alaska, eating too much snack food, playing board games far into the night, and talking. I’m an introvert. Most writers are, to one degree or another. Writing is a solitary exercise and it’s easy to populate my world with imaginary characters from my books and the books I read. It’s good for me to spend time with a group of real woman, interacting, listening, and sharing one bathroom. Life isn’t smooth for all of them. Some of these women are facing custody battles, health problems, depression, neighborhood feuds, financial difficulties, and romantic friction, but their courage is ongoing, and they haven't lost their sense of fun. These are strong women. I wish I could write each of them a happy ending, but they don’t need it. They will soldier on and eventually create their own happy endings, because the only alternative is to give up, and that...