Sunday June 22, 2025: A Small Moment of Delight

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1754:

I hate to start this post this way. But the United States is at war again.

If you would like to understand why the actions taken yesterday to bomb Iran have upset me so, I would recommend this post. I was born in 1950, with a father who served during WWII (and like many of his generation, never spoke about it), so—not counting the wars by proxy or the undeclared military actions in various parts of the world, I have lived through the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan. And in the case of all of these wars, they were started more for political rather than true national security reasons, none of them achieving the goals our political leadership promised had motivated them.

I really had hoped never to see another war by my nation against another nation in my life-time. Then again, I also had hoped that the rights women and minorities had won in my life-time would not be rolled back, that our nation would be able to develop an economic and political system that would provide prosperity for all, not just a tiny elite, and that we could work with other nations to make the world healthier and safer, and begin to reverse the escalating dangers from man-made global climate change. Sigh.

I just took a break to go and reread the latest newsletter by Fix the News, a group dedicated to finding out and sharing the good things that are happening in order to counter despair. I would recommend you go and read this post as well.

And, finally, as I have been doing in my own newsletter, I will continue to look for what can bring me joy and share it with you all. So today, my special moments of delight came as I noticed how many of the currently blooming plants in my neighborhood are purple. I started by taking some more photos of the jacaranda trees that are becoming more and more filled with blossoms, and then I saw that in the same yard there was a plant that had a very similar shade of this purple.

For the rest of the two walks yesterday, I took a photo every time I ran across another example. And I hope these photos bring you a little joy today.

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