Postcard from Palm Springs

With date shakes, mountain views, star gazing (not the Hollywood kind), celebrated authors, and modern art, this desert valley is a great starting point for my New Year.

For centuries, the start of the calendar year was March, not January 1. That is fitting for My Year of Abundance, as I travel this month from Hawaii to California to Arizona to Oregon to see old friends and new landscapes. Not only does March welcome the first day of spring, it’s a blooming month, marking National Plant a Flower Day and National Learn About Butterflies Day. I can get behind that. And what better place to begin my tour of the Western United States than in Palm Springs, California? My gracious and fun host is a friend of decades, Joanie, one of those forever friends that we’re lucky enough to meet. Together, we navigated life as expats in Sweden, raised our children together, traveled to Prague and Jamaica and Croatia, and are always, always there for each other.

Golden Barrel Cactus and Palm Spring street art. Collage created by Louisa Wah

Ours is the kind of friendship that is the focus of the novel The Celebrants by Steven Rowley, the story of four college friends who make a pact to hold living funerals for each other to make sure each of them knows how much they are loved while they’re still alive (if you haven’t read the novel, you should—check out

Kerri Maher

‘s interview with Steven Rowley here). As serendipity would have it, Steven was part of the author talk series at the Rancho Mirage Library (part of the famous Rancho Mirage Writers Festival) a few blocks from Joanie’s Palm Springs home. When Joanie isn’t playing pickle ball or golf or hiking (Palm Springs is surrounded by three mountain ranges, The San Jacinto, The Santa Rosa and The San Bernadino), she’s soaking up the local culture. I love seeing her thrive like a desert bloom in her new surroundings.

Author Steven Rowley, me and Joanie at Rancho Mirage Library

If you’d like to receive the second of my weekly posts, including upcoming postcards from Phoenix and Portland, consider becoming a paid subscriber (which has other perks, like my original voice-overs of every post). Appreciate every one of my readers!