Judy Elsley

About four years ago, our next door neighbors decided to take down the decrepit, knee-high fence between our properties. We all know, as Robert Frost said in “Mending Walls,” that “good fences make good neighbors,” but our little wire fence was an eye sore and we were already good friends. We planted a little cherry tree in the space the fence left which produced five cherries the first year. We picked the cherries and ate them, toasting the tree with glasses of wine. We the

All over Bali, we saw canag sari, little hand made baskets of freshly picked flowers, sometimes with a few noodles or other food. These little offerings are put out early in the morning in temples, on statues, at door steps and the floor of store entrances. This Hindu ritual goes back a thousand years at least, and there are many flower stalls in the early morning markets that sell the component parts or ready made baskets of flowers. What does it mean? Some people say it's

Completing a Ph.D dissertation taught me determination, a quality I've carried into my creative life. Things go wrong. They don't work they way I expected. They don't work at all. What to do about it? Before the dissertation, I would have thrown in my hand in and said, "I'm never doing that again." But now I know to come back to the failure another day asking the question, "What if?" and try again. That's a question creative people ask themselves all the time because it's oft

Yes, I went to the Flaming Lips concert in Ogden last night. No, I'm not familiar with their music. Yes, I had a great time. There were a lot of us. The amphitheater was packed, and it was great fun to see all the people having a good time. The crowd was friendly and courteous; I enjoyed watching them as much as the band. At the risk of offending Flaming Lips fans, I found the show they put on more interesting than the music they played. Wayne Coyne, the vocalist, rides round

I recently bought a copy of “Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things” by Peter Buchanan-Smith at a library book sale. I'd never heard of the book or the author. What a treasure for those of us interested in creativity. The book is composed of collections people have made of things so common most of don’t notice them. For example, Robert Lemons decided to test the utility of a bread crumb trail (like Hansel and Gretel) in Manhattan. He left slices of wonder bread as tra