Full disclosure: There's nothing British about me.
Although I've titled this blog space with a British saying that means "small objects or parts of something," I'm a born and bred Midwesterner who divorced my husband of many years, then transplanted myself in the California desert. I started over in this place of rough and tumble beauty as a 60-year-old straight woman, mom, GG to her grand-kids, magazine writer and devoted yogi with one gay friend, grande margarita and tear-stained cocktail napkin at a time.
It felt like free-falling off a cliff with no safety net when I left my family and dear friends back home, many of whom I'd had since I wore baby blue eye shadow and hot pants that barely covered my behind. But it's here in Palm Springs, a place showered in sunshine and steeped in the lives and loves of yesteryear's movie stars, that I became a star in my new blank slate of a life.
I glued all my bits and bobs back together again.
It's now been 10 years since I set out on this road less traveled. Along the way I found that swimming in the murky dating pool of potential men up and down California's coast is a bit like bobbing for apples, slippery and elusive (ahhh, it's a 95-degree desert October day as I write this, and I physically long for crisp air, the pungent smell of a wood fire and those unsanitary Midwestern festival games!).
You can take the girl out of Kansas, but you can't take the Kansas out of the girl.
So keep reading and please come along for the journey. You'll see me fall, get back up again and set boundaries--and finally learn to lower that fence...around the moat...that protects my castle...to let someone in.
My castle is actually a sweet and tidy mid-century modern gem on a quiet cul-de-sac, but castles aside, my mantra today is purely American:
"Giddyup!"