By Cheryl Moore

I had been looking forward to the beginning of 2021; 2020 had been such a sad year, then January 6^th happened. Chaos and uncertainty filled me.

Since the trouble at the nation’s capital, I’ve made an abrupt change in my paintings. Instead of the landscapes and fanciful trees from a nearby park, my usual work, I’ve been painting abstracts to capture the oddity life has taken.

I start by drawing straight lines across a canvas then I add curves. I step back and study these charcoal marks and try to find some pattern, some way of organizing the geometric spaces I have created. It may take a day of looking.

My color palette is usually blue, blue-violet, and purple with accents of peachy orange and pink. The contrast of light and dark pattern is important.

I am not interested in making great art; I don’t expect to like every piece. My goal is to have fun, to play, to forget the troubles of the world and just spend an hour or two enjoying myself.

Cheryl Moore grew up in the Midwest, then lived in San Francisco to finish high school and attend college where she studied biology. During the late sixties and into the mid-seventies she lived first in Sweden for a year, then for four years in Iran where she served as librarian in a small research library for wildlife biologists.

Nature and science have always been among her interests. After returning to the U.S., she moved to Petaluma and has dabbled in writing stories.

Since retiring from employment at Sonoma State University, she has taken up painting.

By Kristin Cikowski

I suppose that if you are going to have a house, it should be a small enough house so that you can hear everyone at the same time. This is why I love my house  My bedroom sits just across the hall from the kitchen, which, at night, is a passageway for the light that comes from the lamp that sits on the table next to my dad’s arm chair in the family room. The family room is where the TV is located, and is not to be confused with the living room, which does not have a TV, and instead, has the teapot with the crane that is flying over the blue water and creamer that goes with it. They sit next to the wooden fisherman with his delicate fishing pole and line, and the sofas that we cannot jump on even though they have an extremely busy pattern that wouldn’t show the slightest dirt.

My best friend Becky just moved to the new housing development across town, and her new house is very big.  It has two stories. Two stories! It’s huge. It also has a bathroom with just a toilet for the guests to use while they are being entertained downstairs. Now, if we lived in a two-story house, the light from the lamp that sits on the table next to my dad’s arm chair in the family room would not make its way into my room, and I think I would find it hard to fall asleep at night  I suppose I could use my Yogi Bear night light, but my Dad told me to stop using it for a while after he found me cleaning it in the bathroom sink. It was rather dusty, and the slide that sat on the top, projecting Yogi’s face onto my ceiling, was a little out of focus  I didn’t really understand his objection because he is always so insistent that my room stay tidy, but when he explained that water and electricity didn’t mix, I forgave his abrupt volume change.

This house, this house looks like the perfect size. Even though people always want bigger houses, I always think that would spread people out too far from one another, and it would become lonely. Like the houses that my parents walk through once a year at The Street of Dreams. The Street of Dreams. Every year, they build these humongous houses in a swanky neighborhood. It is never in our town, because our town is not swanky. It is usually closer to Portland, the city, because as you get closer to the city, the towns get swankier. My town has sheep, and goats in the front yards.  It is not swanky. But, every year, they build these humongous houses with all these fancy features, like an intercom that you can use to speak to someone on the second floor. My mom could push a button in the kitchen to tell us that dinner was ready as we sat in our rooms on the second floor. So fancy. And they all have pools. I would love to have a pool  I honestly don’t know how long we would be able to swim though because it’s cold, and it rains all the time. 

You should be able to hear people in the house, to make sure they are all still there. I can easily hear if the front door opens when my mom or dad returns home from work. If I was upstairs, in my bedroom, and my mom came home from work, she could be inside the house for at least an hour before I would even notice.

Kristin Cikowski resides in Novato with her husband, two energetic boys and an overly anxious dog. Writing has always been an escape, and when the pandemic forced everyone into their homes, she remembered a writer’s workshop that a friend had mentioned months before. Kristin has used writing as a therapeutic tool and is able to continue that custom thanks to her weekly Zoom meeting with a handful of strangers who provide her encouragement and motivation to write on.

Increscent Moon

By Su Shafer

Starless, Starless Night

I gaze up, surprised to see

The moon looking down

Not at me, she is watching

Something far over the horizon,

Her face radiant with golden pleasure.

Maybe she is looking at tomorrow,

The baby day, still pink and new,

Gently urging it forward as it crawls along

dragging its giant blanket of light behind it.

Her smile is serene and comforts me,

Standing alone in the night,

The quiet space between today and tomorrow.

I feel oddly hopeful as I go back inside.

If the moon is beaming,

Tomorrow must be a better day.

Su Shafer is a creative writer and fledgling poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest, where flannel shirts are acceptable as formal wear and strong coffee is a way of life. There, in a small Baba Yaga house perched near the entrance to The Hidden Forest, odd characters are brewing with the morning cup, and a strange new world is beginning to take shape . . .