Mary E. Trimble

It’s like viewing the perfect mural—row upon row of dazzling color—brilliant red, sparkling yellow, vivid pink, rakish purple. Though picture-perfect, they’re real, these delightful tulip fields of the Skagit Valley. Not only tulips, but daffodils and iris grace these lovely fields. Although Mother Nature dictates the bloom dates, daffodils bloom first, followed by tulips and finally, iris.

Now extended to cover the entire month of April, this year’s 40th annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival also features, in addition to viewing the blooming fields, a packed schedule of events including art shows.

Since the mid-1930s, spring-time visitors to the Skagit Valley have marveled at the striking beauty of tulip, daffodil and iris fields. Northwest Washington, particularly in the Skagit Valley, has become world- famous for its seasonal showcase and for its commercial bulb production. Washington Bulb Company, the nation’s largest tulip, daffodil and iris producer, makes its headquarters in Skagit Valley.

As it happens, the Northwest has perfect bulb-growing climate with cool moist winters, which encourages root growth. Also, relatively cool spring and summer weather helps control diseases common in hotter places. Another factor is well-balanced, level and well-drained soil.

Those who are returning to enjoy the springtime hues will notice that those fields seen last year frequently will not have the same crop this year. That is because flower bulbs, like many other crops, must be rotated to preserve the soil and reduce pest populations. The flowers rotate to their original field about every five years.

Tulip Festival maps are available at many Skagit Valley stores, but it isn’t necessary to have a map to enjoy the blossoms. Signs indicate the “Tulip Route,” or you may simply drive along until you see a field. If there is a pull-off, park and enjoy the view, or even walk along designated paths. Remember, for some traffic on the road, it’s business as usual and drivers aren’t expecting sudden stops. Also, this is a busy time of year for farmers and heavy equipment will be moving about, so please be patient.

The Skagit Valley growers ask for your cooperation in touring the fields. Be aware that only certain fields are open to visitors. Always observe private property; please don’t trespass to get a picture. Enter only those fields with signs posted that visitors are welcome. Never pick a flower—cut flowers are available for sale at various stands.

To get there: The blooming fields are 60 miles north of Seattle, directly off I-5 using exists 221 through 236. All of these exits have tulip brochures at the nearest businesses. The fields are spread out over a 15-mile radius and events are scattered around the entire county. Festival site guide maps are available.

For more information, visit tulipfestival.org or call (360) 428-5959.

Book Review: Captured Secrets

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Mary

Captured Secrets, Book 1 of the “Seven Tine Ranch Romance Book” series by Carmen Peone is a highly suspenseful contemporary Western that takes place on the Colville Indian Reservation in north central Washington.

Sydney Moomaw bids her parents farewell as they leave on vacation from the Seven Tine, their 210-acre guest ranch. But tragically, on the way to the airport they are involved in a car accident and both her parents are killed. Sydney, divorced after sixteen years of marriage, also makes her home at the guest ranch and is now left in charge. While sorting through ranch records, she discovers that the ranch is in serious debt. When her sister learns of the ranch’s dire financial status, she feels they should sell, but Sydney refuses to let go of the ranch she loves.

A mutual friend brings photographer Trey Hardy to the ranch. Trey is on a working-vacation and sees great photography opportunities in the area. He was raised on an Arizona ranch and sees potential in the Seven Tine, but is especially drawn to Sydney. His offers of assistance are rebuffed; Sydney’s independence and stubbornness won’t allow her to accept his help. Although she is a person of faith, she is overwhelmed with the threat of losing the ranch and all that is dear to her.

Sydney has never recovered from a bad marriage to a mean, violent man. Could the mental, emotional, and physical scars of abuse her ex-husband afflicted ever allow her to heal? Although attracted to Trey, she wouldn’t, couldn’t allow herself to trust him, to open herself up to the possibility of more disappointment and heartache.

Captured Secrets is a highly engrossing novel. It’s a story that is steeped in Native values and faith, yet with incidents that threaten the trust and confidence required by strong belief. It’s about accepting help from those you can trust, and opening your heart to hidden blessings. This is a novel that would be appealing to teens and adults who enjoy western settings and ranch life.

Book Review: The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Mary

The Sweet Taste of Muscadines: A Novel by Pamela Terry is a beautifully written story about love of family, of self, and of truth.

Twins Lila Bruce Breedlove and Henry Breedlove learn that their mother, Geneva, died suddenly at their family home in Wesleyan, Georgia. Mysteriously, she was found in the muscadine arbor with a spoon in her hand while in bedclothes. To their knowledge, Geneva had never stepped foot in the tiny grape arbor.

Both Lila and Henry left home after graduating from high school. Lila, a widow after twenty-two years of marriage, lives in Maine and is a successful weaver whose one-of-a-kind creations are eagerly sought after. Henry and his lover, Andrew, live in Rhode Island and run a successful art business. Their younger sister Abigail still lives in Wesleyan, Georgia. The twins return to Wesleyan for their mother’s funeral.

Lila and Henry have mixed feelings about their mother, Geneva. They’ve never felt close to her and always had a sense that she resented them. Geneva was closest to Abigail; the two considered themselves “best friends.” Their father, a Baptist minister, died several years before while a chaplain in Vietnam.

The story is written in the voice of Lila as she observes her home town. As she says, the South is not for the faint of heart. Its hardfast traditions are sacred, and when the family learns Geneva had dictated she will not have a funeral, the town is scandalized. It’s unheard of in the South. Even criminals have funerals. But, true Southern hospitality shines through shock as family and friends plan a gathering at Geneva’s home.

As Lila and Henry gather stories from friends and relatives, they realize their mother had a hidden life, a life shrouded in lies. One thing leads to another as the twins delve into their parents’ hidden secrets. The mystery leads them to Scotland where they discover their family’s past.

The Sweet Taste of Muscadines is a marvelous novel that kept me spellbound. A native southerner, author Pamela Terry offers vivid descriptions of its people, landscape and weather. I could feel the heavy southern summer air, smell the rich soil. Her metaphors are stunning. Lila, speaking of her twin brother: “….the love I felt for my brother draped itself around me like an angel’s wings.” This is a story that will stay with me for a long time.

Book Review: The Long Cold Winter

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Mary

The Long Cold Winter, Book Two of the “509 Crime Stories” by Colin Conway is a gripping mystery novel that takes place in Spokane, Washington, 2017.

Detective Dallas Nash is a recent widower and it’s all he can do to get out of bed. He’s called back to work, but his heart really isn’t into it. Yet he knows he should, he needs to put his mind on something other than his terrible loss. On the way to work he visits his wife’s grave, and again feels the pain of losing her.

To ease him back into working Major Crimes, his supervisor assigns Dallas a cold case. It’s a murder dating back to 1987. Going over the file, Dallas realizes he recognizes the victim–a girl who went to the same high school. He even remembers cruising Spokane’s main drag with friends on a Friday night and one of the fellows, a friend of a friend, points out the girl and says that she’s his girlfriend.

Before he can begin working the case, he’s called out on a murder just discovered. A snow-covered body lies in an open field. The detective has no witnesses and no suspects. So now he has both a recent murder and a thirty-year-old murder to solve.

Author Colin Conway does a good job of describing the mind of a detective. It’s winter in Spokane and Detective Nash spends much of his time battling snow and slush. It’s hard enough working in these conditions, but even tougher when battling depression over losing his beloved wife. Yet he pushes on with surprising results.

People who like mysteries will enjoy this highly suspenseful novel. Those who attended high school or college in the late eighties and early nineties will probably recognize the music titles that haunt Detective Nash. I enjoyed the jargon between the detectives, and learning about the police procedures used in solving cases. Many of the references to the Spokane area were familiar to me. Although I live in the western part of the state, we’ve spent a lot of time in eastern Washington, which constitutes nearly two-thirds of the entire state. The author does a good job of creating a sense of place and time.

Book Review: Half Broke Horses

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Mary

In Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls, I found a character full of life, defying hardship, and through it all maintaining a wonderful sense of humor. Lily Casey Smith had grit, a person who could rise above hard times. The novel takes place in the first half of the twentieth century.

This novel actually started out as a biography about the author’s grandmother. At the time of writing the author didn’t think of the book as fiction, but since she took liberties with quotations and missing details, she decided that it should be a novel.

The story begins when Lily is ten years old, her brother Buster is nine, and sister Helen seven. Her mother, a lady even to ridiculous ends, faces many hardships trying to keep up her self-image at their 160-acre homestead in West Texas. Her father had a bad limp and distorted speech from being kicked by a horse as a boy. By age 6, Lily was helping her dad break horses that he trained to become carriage horses. Because his speech was hard to understand, she was often a go-between him and the ranch hands or in other situations that required clarification.

When Lily turned thirteen she went to boarding school at Loretto Academy of Our Lady of the Light in Santa Fe. To her, school was a glorious vacation. She could sleep in until 6:00 and didn’t even have to do chores before school! She loved school and was a bright student. Sadly, her father couldn’t afford tuition so she had to return home.

At the age of fifteen, Lily passed a test to become an itinerant replacement teacher in Red Lake, Arizona. She rode horseback, alone, 500 miles to her teaching post in Arizona. She taught in the one-room school for four years, but had not yet finished high school.

Lily’s story continues in Chicago where she worked days and went to school in the evenings to earn her high school diploma. She had an unfortunate marriage that ended in annulment. Lily attended the Arizona state teachers’ college in Flagstaff and eventually married again. Lily and her husband Jim had two children and managed a large ranch in Arizona.

I loved this story of bravery in the face of defeat, of perseverance in tough times, and the wisdom to follow her father’s advice: “learn how to fall” and “find your purpose.”

Book Review: If the Creek Don’t Rise

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Mary

“God must feel like this all the time—to know more than regular folks do and keep it to his self.”

If the Creek Don’t Rise, a novel by Leah Weiss, is an amazing study of Appalachian people in the 1970s. Sadie Blue, pregnant, has only been married fifteen days and has already been beaten several times by her mean, violent husband, Roy Tupkin. Roy not only beats her, but beats her down. She’s still a young girl, originally taken in by Roy’s charm. Sadie has ambition and potential. Has she thrown away any hope of achieving her dreams?

It causes a stir when Kate Shaw arrives to take the place of the previous teacher in the one-room school house, and she’s met by some with distrust. She’s an outsider and doesn’t understand their ways. But some come forward to make the new teacher feel welcome. Kate is aghast with conditions of this little community—the poverty, filth, and superstitions—but once she becomes acquainted she realizes there is much the eye can’t see.

The story is told in first person, present tense. The clearly defined characters range from wonderfully kind and generous to mean and spiteful. Although written in Appalachian dialect and backwoods thought patterns, the story is easy to read and understand. I very much enjoyed If the Creek Don’t Rise, written by an author born in eastern North Carolina and raised in the foothills of Virginia. The setting, characters, and situations are believable. I highly recommend this novel to anyone interested in learning about Appalachia and its people.

Book Review: Somebody’s Business

Posted on February 20, 2023 by Mary

Somebody’s Business, book three in the “Nickel Hill Series” by Irene Bennett Brown continues to follow energetic Jocelyn Pladson as she buys a livery stable in Skiddy, Kansas. Although some say motorcars will soon take the place of horses and mules, Jocelyn, her husband Pete, and most of the townspeople and local farmers know better. It’s 1906 and they are years away from replacing horses and mules for transportation and heavy farm work.

The Pladsons, their little son Andy, 3, and two older children they’ve taken in over the years, run a farm in addition to the livery in town. It takes a lot of energy to handle both, but they are an ambitious family, people who have known hard times and have persevered.

But not all are happy about the livery changing hands. The lady across the street complains of its smell. A newcomer in town, blustery, vain J. L. Cochran wants the building site to sell motorcars. He tries every dirty trick possible to convince the townspeople that the livery should be torn down and replaced with a new building, his building.

Author Irene Bennett Brown does a superb job of placing the reader in the time, place, and mind-set of the early 1900s. We hear J.L. Cochran’s shiny new Oldsmobile chugging and lurching down the street, the hee-haw of mules, see the clothing of the period, the hairstyles, farm scenes and the handling of horses and mules.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading the first two books of the “Nickel Hill Series,” Miss Royal’s Mules and Tangled Times. Somebody’s Business is the perfect sequel. Although it’s nice to read books of a series in order, each book stands alone. It’s always fun to catch up with a lively, heartwarming character like Jocelyn Pladson. I recommend this book for teens and adults who enjoy reading about the struggles and triumphs of the early 1900s.

Book Review: Between You and Me

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Mary

Mary Norris, copy editor for the New Yorker, has written a wonderfully informative book, Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. The author makes grammar fun, yet each chapter holds a wealth of memorable tips.

Norris talks about her early days at the New Yorker and the painful lessons she’s learned through her years at America’s premier literary magazine. She has mastered the art of fixing something without draining the sentence of its character.

Chapter by chapter Norris talks about the difference between this and that, which and that, dangling participles, often giving hints about how to figure out the correct word. She goes into some detail about the predicament of having no common-sex singular for he, she, or it. She suggests that we might adopt s/he, he/she or even heesh. She suggests that when wondering which pronouns to use when saying something like between you and me, reverse the pronouns. Between I and you just wouldn’t sound right. Then there’s that pesky who and whom. She covers it all.

I laughed right out loud when the author discusses the serial comma, the comma before “and” in a series. She believes in retaining the comma for fear a sentence will come out as it did in this example: “And there was the country-and-western singer who ‘was joined by his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings.’”

Many of Norris’ comments are based on the “New Yorker style.” The magazine, of course, has many dictionaries and reference books. But, as the author says, “The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can’t let it push you around.” Use common sense.

The book covers almost any question of punctuation imaginable: the comma, dash, semicolon, colon, exclamation point (which she calls a screamer), and the en and em dashes (which have no spaces before and after).

Between You and Me is a rather short book, with the last thirty percent of it taken with Acknowledgments, Notes (from each chapter), Appendix, and Index.

I loved Between You and Me. It’s charming and witty, and I learned a lot along the way.

Book Review: An Unfinished Story

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Mary

An Unfinished Story: A Novel by Boo Walker, takes place in modern-day Florida. It’s a story of renewal, of overcoming grief and guilt, and turning misunderstanding to acceptance.

Claire Kite lost her husband, David, three years ago in a tragic car accident. Although she continues to manage her up-scale restaurant in Coquina Key, Florida, she’s just putting in time. Life isn’t worth living without David. But she knows life goes on and she’s determined to start anew. The first step is to sell their house—it’s not a home without David.

David, a successful architect, was also an aspiring writer and was about half way through his first novel, Saving Orlando. While cleaning out David’s office, Claire finds the manuscript and reads it for the first time. She’s impressed with the story and feels if she can find a writer to finish it, she will have kept David’s memory alive with something that had been dear to him.

Whitaker Grant is in a slump. Once famous for his first and only bestselling novel, a masterpiece that became a successful film, he has run out of steam. It’s been ten years and he hasn’t written anything worthy of print, his wife has left him, and he’s wallowing in mid-life crises.

When Claire approaches Whitaker to take on the task of finishing David’s book, the has-been writer turns her down. She persists and what follows is a story of redemption, though not easily won.

I loved this novel. The author tells the story with a strong sense of place—I could smell Florida’s salty air, could almost savor its unique cuisine. I appreciated his sharing a writer’s life, of what it means to lose yourself in a story, to bare your soul, and to have the tenacity to stick with the project long enough to bring it to a proper conclusion.

Book Review: The House on Blackberry Hill

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Mary

The House on Blackberry Hill, Book 1 of 5 of the “Jewell Cove Book” series by Donna Alward is an enchanting romantic mystery with a sizzle.

Abigal (Abby) Foster has inherited a mansion and a hefty sum of money from a relative she never knew existed. But then, she’s never really known family, never felt she belonged to anyone or any place. She’d been shuffled from relative to relative, finally living with a grandmother who was loving but closed-mouthed about the family’s past. Abby is an elementary school teacher now and has learned to never let herself get close to people or places. She’s better off without attachments. But now she somehow must deal with this mansion. She takes a leave of absence from her teaching job and drives from Halifax, Nova Scotia to the charming little harbor town of Jewell Cove, Maine.

Upon examination of the mansion, Abby sees that at one time it had charm, but it is in desperate need of repair. The boxes and trunks in the attic, though, obviously hold secrets. She’ll have to sort through all that stuff, too. Will those secrets bring more unhappiness, unearth truths she’s better off not knowing about? As it stands, this house is a symbol of the family who’d cast her off.

But the mansion certainly can’t be put on the market in its present state.

Tom Arseneault, contractor, comes well recommended. Well, okay, he happens to be a hunk, but one that comes with a troubled past. A local fellow, Tom has always loved this mansion and he puts his considerable skills into the mansion’s restoration.

As they work together, Abby learns about the close-knit townspeople, many of whom are Tom’s relatives. She observes how family members relate to one another, even in strife. She sees strong family bonds, strong enough to overlook faults and love one another despite differences. And against her better judgement, she finds herself attracted to Tom. But will his painful past allow him to pursue happiness with Abby?

I enjoyed The House on Blackberry Hill and found the relationship between Abby and Tom engaging. The mansion takes on a life of its own as its restoration progresses. I was intrigued by the mysterious element throughout the story. Finally, I enjoyed the small town atmosphere, its quaint shops, and the sustained loyalty shown to family and friends.