For most of my life, I stood behind the camera, preserving everyone else's stories.
Over a 45-year career as a professional photographer—and later, 27 years as an educator, mother, wife, and lifelong observer of people—I became skilled at noticing fleeting moments: love, milestones, heartbreak, laughter, quiet connections, and all the little things that make a life meaningful.
I spent decades documenting those moments for others, often without realizing how much of my own story was quietly being tucked beneath the roles I was playing, the expectations I was meeting, and the familiar patterns life so easily creates.
Then life shifted.
After retiring from a 27-year teaching career and closing a long chapter that had spanned more than four decades behind the camera, I made a decision that surprised even me. I sold nearly everything I owned, packed up my Border Collies, moved into an RV, and spent six months on the road asking questions I probably should have been asking myself much sooner.
After spending a lifetime capturing everyone else's stories, what happens when you finally turn the lens toward your own?
What happens when the routines, responsibilities, and identities that once defined you begin to fall away?
The Life Outside the Frame is my attempt to answer those questions.
This memoir is about reinvention, family, love, loss, resilience, dogs, adventure, memory, and the sometimes uncomfortable awakening that comes when we begin to recognize the unconscious loops we've been living inside for years.
The reflections below are small windows into that larger journey.
Moments that made me laugh.
Moments that broke my heart.
Moments that shaped me.
Moments I almost missed entirely.
Because sometimes the most important parts of our lives happen just outside the frame.
Moments Outside the Frame
Same House, Different Stories
The other day, I found myself laughing while rereading a questionnaire I once sent my siblings—questions about childhood, personality, memories, family roles, and how each of us saw ourselves growing up. I laughed out loud at some of the memories, and I’ll admit, I got a little teary-eyed too. Funny how time does that. It softens some things, sharpens others, and somehow turns the ordinary moments of childhood into something unexpectedly precious.
What struck me most was how four children can grow up under the same roof, with the same parents, the same rules, the same heartbreaks, the same expectations—and somehow walk away carrying completely different versions of the same story.
We grew up in a rural world that would probably give modern parents heart palpitations. We were sent outside in the morning and told not to come back until lunch, only to be sent right back out again until dinner. We roamed the hills, splashed in the stream catching pollywogs, built forts, and played endless games of hide-and-seek in a magical little place we called the Enchanted Forest. Our childhood was full of dirt, freedom, imagination, bare feet and scraped knees.
But it was also shaped by responsibility.
After our father died, life changed for all of us. My mother became a single parent and eventually went back to school, which meant we all had to grow up a little faster. My older sister stepped into a role far beyond what most girls her age should have had to carry, becoming a kind of second mother in many ways. We all had chores, responsibilities, and our share of helping maintain the avocado grove—watering, harvesting, pitching in because that’s simply what family did.
And yet, despite all of that shared history, we became remarkably different people. One practical and steady, with a quiet strength and dependability that has always anchored the family in its own way. One polished, socially confident, and deeply devoted to the people she loves. One analytical, mischievous, and often the one keeping us all laughing, but also fiercely loyal and big-hearted enough to tell you without hesitation that he’d do anything for the people he loves. And one who was already framing life through an invisible lens long before she ever picked up a camera, only to write about it decades later.
What fascinates me now is not that we remember things differently. It’s that we lived the same life and somehow each came away with our own version of what it meant.
That, to me, may be one of the most beautiful and mysterious things about family.
Escaping Groundhog Day
Have you ever looked up one day and realized you’ve been living parts of your life on repeat without fully choosing them?
Not because your life is bad. Not because you failed.
But because routines become habits, habits become identities, and identities quietly become lives we stop questioning.
But not all loops are bad. Some loops are deeply human.
The satisfaction of imagining something, creating it, finishing it, and holding the result in your hands.
A photograph envisioned, captured, edited, and printed.
A handmade dog leash braided, sewn, shipped, and loved by a customer.
A dog trained patiently until understanding clicks in.
Those loops create joy, momentum, purpose, and the quiet satisfaction of completion.
We need those.
The dangerous loops are the unconscious ones.
The stories we tell ourselves.
The fears that quietly make our decisions.
The relationships we stay in.
The roles we keep performing simply because they’ve become familiar.
And then one day, something interrupts the pattern.
A loss. A divorce. Retirement. A move.
A quiet moment of asking: Is this really the life I chose?
For me, selling nearly everything, leaving California, moving into an RV, and stepping into an entirely different chapter became that interruption.
Not an escape. An awakening.
Because maybe the goal isn’t escaping loops altogether.
Maybe the goal is learning to recognize which loops are helping us build a meaningful life… and which ones are quietly keeping us asleep.
Holding Back the Flow of the River
The older I get, the more I realize I’ve spent much of my life trying to hold back the flow of the river.
At first, through photography.
For forty-five years, I stood behind a camera freezing moments that would never exist again in exactly the same way—a child’s laughter, a bride hugging her father, snow geese lifting off frozen Skagit Valley fields, a dog suspended midair chasing a Frisbee, generations of students growing up before my eyes.
People think photographers simply take pictures.
But what we really do is witness and capture time.
We preserve versions of people, places, and moments that quietly disappear almost as quickly as they arrive.
Maybe that’s why writing this memoir feels so familiar.
I’m still trying to hold back the flow of the river.
Not because I want to live in the past.
But because these moments mattered.
The people mattered.
The life I built, the people I loved, the heartbreaks, the adventures, the versions of myself that existed along the way—they all mattered.
Maybe memoir is simply our way of stepping into the current for a moment and saying:
Wait. Let me hold onto this a little longer.
The Dead Seagull
It was just a parking lot.
A Hobby Lobby parking lot, not particularly full, not particularly memorable—except for the beautiful seagull lying motionless on the pavement.
Most people probably drove past without a second thought.
I couldn’t.
Something about innocent death has always stopped me in my tracks. Not because death itself is unnatural—it isn’t. Nature survives on death. Hawks hunt. Fish swallow smaller fish. Even we humans justify loss in the name of survival, convenience, or necessity.
And yet, I looked at that seagull and felt heartbreak.
Why?
That simple moment opened a much larger question for me: why do some of us carry such deep empathy for animals… and why do certain losses stay with us far longer than others?
Maybe because grief has a way of recognizing itself.
Maybe because some losses never really leave us.
Maybe because a dead bird in a parking lot is never just a dead bird.
Adulting and "All The Things"
Somewhere along the way, adulthood became less about living and more about maintenance.
Pay the bills. Buy the groceries. Schedule the appointments. Do the laundry. Clean the bathroom. Refill the prescriptions. Answer the emails. Repeat.
Day after day, year after year.
That’s where the Groundhog Day feeling sneaks in—not through dramatic crises, but through unconscious loops we rarely stop to question.
I look back at earlier decades of my life and honestly wonder how I managed it all. Running a business. Teaching full-time. Long commutes. Raising children. Managing a home. Marriage. Meals. Laundry. Social obligations. Emotional labor.
Women of my generation, especially, were often expected to do everything while making it look effortless.
And now I watch younger generations struggle with a different version of the same burden. Technology was supposed to make life easier, but in many ways, it simply changed the format of the overwhelm.
Worse, we stopped teaching practical life skills while increasing life’s complexity.
So perhaps the real question is this:
Are we actually living—or just maintaining the machinery of existence?
Maybe adulthood isn’t supposed to feel this relentlessly complicated.
Maybe the goal isn’t to get better at carrying all the weight.
Maybe the wiser path is to intentionally build a life that requires less of it.
Because survival and living are not the same thing.
Drawn to Brilliance
One of the things I’ve come to understand about myself over the years is that I’ve always been drawn to remarkable people.
As a little girl, it was Barbra Streisand. After seeing On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, I was completely captivated. To me, she was talent, confidence, wit, beauty, and presence all wrapped into one unforgettable force. I collected her albums, watched her movies repeatedly, and admired her from afar for years. If I’m being honest, had I somehow met her back then, I probably would have completely lost my composure.
Years later, reading Barbra’s memoir gave me a perspective I never had as a child. She wrote openly about how strange fame can feel—how people rush toward celebrities declaring their love, bringing gifts, pouring emotion onto someone they don’t actually know. They know the performances. The characters. The public version. But not the real person behind them.
That landed with me.
Because I understood both sides of that truth.
Later in life, that same admiration showed up in different forms.
A photography mentor with a larger-than-life personality—charming, funny, generous, the kind of person who could fill a room with energy.
A brilliant female school administrator whose instincts, intelligence, and leadership deeply impressed me. As a woman who grew up in a time when most of the people calling the shots were men, I think I especially noticed women who carried authority with confidence, clarity, and grace. She saw people. She noticed problems before others did. She handled situations with remarkable instinct and strength. I admired that.
For a long time, I didn’t fully understand this part of myself.
But I do now.
As a photographer, I spent decades training my eye to notice what others often missed—subtle expressions, fleeting moments, energy, personality, beauty. Maybe that way of seeing naturally extended beyond the lens and into the people around me.
I notice competence. Humor. Warmth. Confidence. The way someone carries themselves. The way they make other people feel.
And when I admired someone, I didn’t do it halfway.
I wanted to be near that energy.
Not because I wanted to be them, but because something in their brilliance stirred something in me.
Age has taught me an important distinction.
Admiring someone’s brilliance doesn’t mean you know them.
Appreciating someone’s gifts doesn’t mean you need access to them.
Sometimes it’s enough simply to recognize something extraordinary when you see it—and carry that inspiration forward into your own life.
My Border Collie, Coast
Some companions don’t need words.
Coast came into my life as an 8 week old puppy from a cattle ranch in Idaho—a striking split-faced red and white Border Collie with deep amber eyes, endless athleticism, and a mind that seems to miss very little.
Like most Border Collies, he’s always “on” when adventure calls. A Frisbee dog. An agility partner. A squirrel detective. A trail companion. A ready-for-anything traveler who adapted from California house life to RV living without complaint.
But beneath all that intensity is something softer.
Sensitivity.
Coast has an uncanny emotional awareness that has made me pause more than once. He once howled uncontrollably when an elderly neighbor passed away nearby, as if something in him understood loss before I did. He forms deep attachments, reads people quickly, and somehow knows when it’s time to run full speed across a field… and when it’s time to quietly curl up beside me for an afternoon nap.
People often ask whether dogs really feel empathy.
If you’ve lived with Coast, that question feels almost unnecessary.
As I write this memoir about life, loss, reinvention, and the winding roads that brought me here, Coast has been more than a dog.
He’s been witness, companion, comic relief, emotional support, and steady co-pilot through one of the biggest life transitions I’ve ever made.
And yes… probably still on squirrel patrol.
Were We Meant to See All This?
I grew up in a world where news came from the morning paper and tragedy felt farther away. Today, we sip coffee while watching wars, disasters, violence, and heartbreak unfold in real time from around the globe. In this deeply personal chapter, I reflect on history, photography, faith, anxiety, and the strange emotional burden of modern life—wondering whether all this exposure is making us wiser… or simply more numb.
The Hidden Nervous System
For most of my life, I thought trust was something we decided.
Then I spent decades watching it happen.
As a photographer, I learned very quickly that people rarely show up in front of a camera feeling completely comfortable. They worry about how they look. They worry about being judged. They worry about looking awkward, old, heavy, nervous, or simply not good enough.
What fascinated me was how quickly those feelings could change.
If I was relaxed, they relaxed. If I was confident, they borrowed that confidence. If I made them feel safe, they began to trust not only me, but themselves. Within minutes, shoulders dropped, smiles became genuine, and something authentic appeared in front of my lens.
Years later, I noticed the same thing while working with dogs.
Dogs are masters at reading nervous systems. They don't care what we say. They care what we feel. A hesitant handler creates a hesitant dog. A confident handler creates a confident dog. The dog borrows our emotional state and wears it as if it were their own.
The more I paid attention, the more I realized that people aren't much different.
We are constantly borrowing emotional cues from one another. Confidence spreads. Fear spreads. Calm spreads. Anxiety spreads. We walk into rooms carrying invisible signals, and everyone around us responds to them whether they realize it or not.
What the dogs taught me was something photography had been showing me all along: trust isn't simply a decision. It's an experience. It's something we feel in another person's presence.
One of the unexpected gifts of retirement has been having enough time to notice these patterns. To recognize how often I have given my own power away to fear, uncertainty, or self-doubt. And to realize that when we learn to quiet our own nervous system, we don't just change ourselves.
We change the people—and sometimes the dogs—around us as well.
No Shame in RV Living
When people hear that I live full-time in an RV park, the response is often a mixture of curiosity and quiet sympathy.
“Really?”
“Is that what you wanted to do?”
“Wow, I could never do that.”
The questions are usually well-intentioned, but they’re often wrapped in an assumption that RV living must be a fallback plan rather than a deliberate choice. For many people, success is still measured by square footage, a permanent address, and a house full of possessions.
The truth is, I don’t live here because I have to. I live here because I choose to.
Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that success looks a certain way—a large house, a garage full of stuff, the newest car in the driveway, and a mortgage that quietly dictates the next thirty years of our lives. We absorb these ideas without ever stopping to ask whether they actually make us happy.
When I left Southern California and downsized into my RV, I discovered something unexpected: less stuff created more freedom.
My Brinkley isn’t a vacation trailer. It’s my home. It’s comfortable, practical, and designed for full-time living. I have everything I need, and very little that I don’t.
What I’ve gained is far more valuable than square footage. I’ve gained flexibility. Community when I want it. Solitude when I need it. Financial breathing room. Time for my dogs, my photography, my writing, and the experiences that matter far more to me than possessions ever did.
RV living isn’t a sign that life didn’t work out.
For some of us, it’s exactly what freedom looks like.
The older I get, the less interested I am in impressing people and the more interested I am in living authentically. I’ve learned that happiness isn’t found in having more. Sometimes it’s found in realizing you already have enough.
The Republican Trade Mission
In the early 1990s, a photography assignment took me on a twelve-day journey through Austria, Rome, Czechoslovakia, and a newly opened Poland, just emerging from decades of communist rule. Armed with sixty-six rolls of film and a camera that rarely left my face, I photographed diplomats, business leaders, embassies, museums, and some of the most significant historical sites in Europe.
Along the way, I stood beneath Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, toured Auschwitz where piles of shoes and eyeglasses revealed the unimaginable human cost of hatred, wandered through the Polish countryside while unknowingly attracting attention everywhere I went, and had dinner at the embassy of Shirley Temple Black—the same Shirley Temple whose movies I had watched and adored as a little girl growing up in Southern California.
When friends asked me what I had seen after I returned home, my answer was always the same:
“I’ll tell you when I see the pictures.”
In the days before digital photography, those sixty-six rolls of film still had to be developed and printed. The truth was, I had spent nearly two weeks experiencing the world through a viewfinder. I was so busy documenting the journey that I hadn’t fully processed it myself.
This chapter is about one extraordinary trip, the remarkable people I met along the way, and the realization that after spending a lifetime capturing everyone else’s stories, I finally needed to start paying attention to my own.
Beauty Is Not a Luxury
Somewhere along the way, we began treating beauty as optional.
We embraced convenience, efficiency, and affordability. We learned to replace rather than repair, upgrade rather than preserve, and purchase based on speed rather than craftsmanship. In many ways, modern life became easier.
But I sometimes wonder what was lost in the process.
Beauty is not the same thing as extravagance. A beautiful space does not have to be a mansion. A beautiful life does not require wealth. My RV is proof of that. It is simple, functional, and thoughtfully designed. The light pours through the windows. The space feels welcoming. It brings me joy every time I walk inside.
Humans have always surrounded themselves with beauty. Long before technology, people carved patterns into furniture, painted murals on walls, planted gardens, composed music, and created art. None of those things were necessary for survival, yet every civilization did them anyway.
Why?
Because beauty feeds something inside us.
It slows us down. It invites us to notice. It reminds us that life is more than productivity and efficiency.
As a photographer, I spent decades creating portraits that families displayed in their homes. Those photographs were never necessities. They were reminders of love, connection, and moments worth remembering. Years later, I still walk into homes and see my work hanging on the walls. The photographs remain because beauty matters.
The same is true of art, music, architecture, gardens, handmade objects, and the craftsmanship that once surrounded everyday life.
If beauty were unimportant, why do millions of people travel across oceans to see centuries-old cathedrals, castles, gardens, and museums? Why do we stop and stare at a breathtaking mountain view or a sunset over the water?
People don't travel great distances to tour a warehouse.
They travel to experience beauty.
Yet much of modern life seems to be moving in the opposite direction. We build faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than ever before, but often at the expense of craftsmanship, character, and permanence. We have become accustomed to replacing things rather than cherishing them. Disposable has become normal.
And perhaps that is why so many people feel restless despite living in the most convenient era in human history.
Maybe the answer isn't to fill our homes with expensive things.
Maybe the answer is simply to invite more beauty into our lives.
Take the hike.
Visit the historic building.
Listen to the music.
Plant the flowers.
Support the artist.
Learn a craft.
Hang the photograph.
Pause long enough to notice the eagle, the tulip, the mountain, or the sunset.
Beauty doesn't have to be expensive. But perhaps it does need to be intentional.
The question isn't whether humans need beauty.
The question is whether, in our pursuit of convenience, we're forgetting to make room for it.
The Blur
The older I get, the more I realize how quickly life passes.
One day you're young and full of plans. The next, you're retired and wondering where the years went. Somewhere in between, life becomes a whirlwind of careers, relationships, bills, obligations, responsibilities, and all the things we're told we should do.
Go to college. Build a career. Get married. Buy a house. Raise children. Save for retirement.
None of those things are wrong. In fact, many of them can lead to a wonderful life. The problem is that sometimes we become so busy checking the boxes that we forget to ask ourselves whether we're truly paying attention while we're living it.
I think that's why so many years feel like a blur.
We're moving so fast that we stop noticing.
We stop noticing what brings us joy. We stop noticing the people we love. We stop noticing the simple moments that eventually become our most treasured memories.
Most importantly, we stop noticing each other.
A few sincere words can change someone's entire day.
Thank you.
I appreciate you.
You're really good at that.
You made a difference.
Those observations cost us nothing, yet they remind people that they are seen.
I've never understood why we're so reluctant to compliment one another. If I notice a woman wearing a beautiful color, I'll tell her. If someone shows kindness, works hard, or handles a difficult situation with grace, I'll say so. Life is too short to keep good thoughts to ourselves.
The older I get, the more I believe that a meaningful life isn't measured by titles, promotions, or how much money we accumulate. It's measured by the moments we were fully present, the people we encouraged, the beauty we noticed, and the courage we had to follow our own hearts instead of someone else's expectations.
At the end of our lives, I don't think we'll be asking whether we completed every task on our to-do list. We'll be asking whether we truly lived.
Did we notice?
Did we appreciate?
Did we encourage?
Did we love?
Did we follow what made us come alive?
Those are the things worth remembering before they disappear into the blur.
Do My Children Know Me?
My mother is ninety-three. My daughter is twenty-five. Somewhere between them stands me.
For most of my life, my mother was simply Mom. The woman who raised me, worried about me, frustrated me, and loved me. It wasn't until I sat down to help tell her story that I began to see the woman behind the title—a barefoot little girl growing up during the Depression, a left-handed child forced to change, a young woman navigating a world very different from my own.
Suddenly, she wasn't just my mother anymore. She was a person.
That realization led to an uncomfortable question: Do my own children know me?
Not Mom. Not the woman who packed lunches, attended competitions, solved problems, and spent years putting everyone else's needs before her own. Do they know the young photographer who traveled the world, photographed presidents, stood in the Sistine Chapel, chased dreams, made mistakes, fell in love, lost her way, found herself again, and eventually traded a suburban house for life in an RV?
Or do they only know the role I played in their story?
As I look at the three generations of women in my family, I can't help but think of a river.
My mother stands at one end, looking upstream toward the memories that shaped her. The little girl she once was. The family she grew up in. The hardships she endured. The people she loved and lost along the way.
My daughter stands at the other end, looking downstream toward the future. The life she is building. The adventures still waiting. The dreams she has yet to chase.
And I stand somewhere in the middle.
Old enough to understand where my mother came from. Old enough to recognize where my daughter is headed. Old enough to realize that every person I love had a life before me and a future beyond me.
Perhaps that is one of life's great paradoxes. We spend years trying to understand our children. We spend years caring for our parents. Yet often we don't truly see them as complete human beings until much later—if we ever do at all.
The Life You Walk Past
I’ve been blessed with a career that has allowed me to spend more than forty years looking closely at the world around me.
My camera has taken me from presidential inaugurations to classrooms, from weddings to wildlife, from Europe to the Pacific Northwest. Along the way, I’ve stood inside the Sistine Chapel, walked through Auschwitz, photographed world leaders, watched eagles soar overhead, and spent quiet mornings admiring tiny flowers growing beneath my feet.
For years, I considered myself a good photographer, but not a great one. I compared my work to photographers with bigger audiences, bigger awards, and bigger reputations. Then one day I found myself scrolling through forty-five years of my own photographs. Weddings, portraits, political events, classrooms, travel, dog sports, wildlife, and everyday moments unfolded across my screen. Along with the images came the memories.
And for the first time, I wondered if I had been asking the wrong question.
Maybe the measure of a photographer isn’t how many people admire their work.
Maybe it’s how deeply they noticed the world while they were here.
A friend recently told me she sees things differently now because of me. She notices eagles on fence posts, hawks along the highway, and light filtering through the trees—things she used to drive right past. That may be one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received.
As a photographer and teacher, I spent decades encouraging others to slow down, look closer, and discover the extraordinary hidden within ordinary moments. The older I get, the more convinced I am that joy, wonder, and gratitude often arrive in the smallest ways: a flower beside the trail, a hawk on a fence post, a laugh around the dinner table, or a dog waiting for one more throw of the ball.
This chapter explores photography, imagination, curiosity, and the gift of truly seeing the world around us.
Because sometimes the most meaningful parts of life aren’t the places we travel to or the milestones we achieve.
They’re the beautiful things we almost walked past.