For most of my life, I stood behind the camera, preserving everyone else’s stories.
As a professional photographer, 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 long chapters of my life in Southern California, 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.
Who am I when I’m no longer behind the lens?
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
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.
Hold Back the River
The older I get, the more I realize I’ve spent much of my life trying to hold back 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Kindness Problem
Recently, my son and I were talking about kindness.
He is one of the kindest people I know—genuinely kind, not performatively kind. The kind of person who naturally takes care of others, listens carefully, and shows up when people need him.
What surprised me was when he admitted that some people don't trust it.
They assume there must be an angle. A hidden motive. A performance.
The conversation stayed with me because it raised a bigger question: Why are we sometimes suspicious of genuine kindness?
Maybe we've all encountered too many people who pretended to care. Maybe we've learned to look for the catch. Or maybe authentic kindness has become uncommon enough that we don't quite know what to do with it when we encounter it.
The older I get, the more I think kindness may be one of the few qualities that reveals itself only over time. Not because it is fake, but because real character doesn't announce itself. It simply remains consistent long enough to be believed.
It's a question I've been thinking about lately: When we encounter genuine kindness, why do we sometimes trust it last?
Seventy-Five Years of Change
Verse 1
I was twelve years old on a black horse
Riding bareback through the hills
Me and my brothers catching pollywogs
Down by the creek beyond the field
We ran barefoot all through summer
Built our worlds with imagination
Waiting for the milkman bringing popsicles
On hot summer afternoons
We watched Shirley Temple dancing
On a black-and-white TV
Never guessing all the changes
That the future held for me
Chorus
We have witnessed seventy-five years of change
More than a thousand years before
We watched the world we knew keep turning
Into something never seen before
Through every joy and every heartbreak
Through every loss and every gain
What a time to have been living
Through seventy-five years of change
Verse 2
Rotary phones and rabbit-ear antennas
Thomas Guides upon the seat
Cursive letters, film and flashbulbs
Riding bicycles down the street
No seatbelts in the family station wagon
No helmets hanging by the door
We simply wandered till we found it
And nobody asked for more
Three TV channels after dinner
Record players spinning round
The neighborhood was our playground
Till the porch light called us home
Chorus
We have witnessed seventy-five years of change
More than a thousand years before
We watched the world we knew keep turning
Into something never seen before
Through every joy and every heartbreak
Through every loss and every gain
What a time to have been living
Through seventy-five years of change
Verse 3
We watched a man walk on the moon
Saw the Berlin Wall come down
Held our breath for Challenger
And felt the silence in the crowd
We mourned for Princess Diana
Watched the Twin Towers disappear
Then lived through COVID's lonely season
A chapter few thought we'd see here
The world kept changing all around us
Faster than we'd ever known
Yet somehow every generation
Found a way to carry on
Bridge
We learned new words and new inventions
Watched old certainties fade away
From film cameras to computers
Through every passing day
Some things vanished with the decades
Some things never really change
A hand to hold, a friend beside you
And the courage to embrace change
Curiosity kept us moving
Through every decade rushing by
Still asking questions of tomorrow
Still looking upward at the sky
Final Chorus
We have witnessed seventy-five years of change
More than a thousand years before
From black horses to moon landings
To things we couldn't dream before
Through every joy and every heartbreak
Through every loss and every gain
And if tomorrow changes everything
We'll learn that world the same
Because we've spent a lifetime learning
That's the gift the years have gave
What a time to have been living
Through seventy-five years of change
Outro
From pollywogs and creek beds
To towers, walls, and moonlit skies
We were there
We witnessed it
Seventy-five years of change