Marta  Wiggins

One of the reasons I love photography is that it sharpens awareness of my surroundings. I see rather than just observe. Here is an...

We have had an unusually wet and cold-ish winter in LA this year. A Saturday off last month, as I had my coffee deciding what to so, the...

Gather up your dreams And cast them wide For when dreams take flight Possibilities abound Doubt slinks away When dreams take flight...

Traveling up north on the Shinkansen, stilted conversation punctuated extended bouts of silence. I would never have an easy relationship...

April 1, 1989 I landed at Narita Airport with a one-way ticket on a rainy evening. I had a total of $300 in my pocket--not enough to get...

Plum blossoms are among my favorites. In the dreary cold of winter, they push their way into world bringing vibrance and color to a...

The years I spent in Japan walk along side me every day at the ready to prompt memories. I spent 7 years spanning a decade with about a...

Last night at book club we discussed Isabel Allende’s In the Midst of Winter. The basic premise of the book is that a chance car...

Yesterday, I travelled to the Woolsey burn area to help at a Disaster Assistance Center (DAC). I arrived in the morning, not exactly...

Day 1 Redux: I missed yesterday so the rules of the game says that I need to start over again. Why did I set such crazy rules for...

Today, I am celebrating the individual. Those of us who stand out as our own. Often called quirky, often pressured to conform. Some of...

The 3rd Thursday of each month sees me starting the day with a Library Managers meeting and end it 13 hours later stacking chairs after...

Cats have a way of worming themselves into our hearts. Misha is no exception. He is a funny big galumph of a cat with a scratchy yowling...

This morning, I awoke to a red dawn with a ringed sun tinged from the smoke of the fires raging through LA. One prevalent feature of...

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic that I got for either Christmas or my birthday when I was 13 years old. I loved taking photos and...

It took me several months before I put my name on the wait list for a copy of National Book Award Finalist title Pachinko by Min Jin Lee....

When I lived in Hiroshima, I wrote both a day trip column Tripping Out as well as an interview style column called On the Couch with......

Before I was a blogger, I wrote a day trip column for the the Expat English Language Magazine The Outsider. Last summer, I published one...

This month marks a decade, 10 years that I have been keeping a blog, this one and the I'm a Stranger Here, Too, that I traded in for...

On Facebook today, a friend shared a photo post asking Who else loves fried green tomatoes? Share if you do. This reminded me of this...