Karen Gilden – Medium

Karen Gilden

The black and white of it

I’m a white woman. I am thoroughly white. My DNA is 60% English, Scottish, and Welsh. Scandinavia and Europe’s west coast make up the rest…

3 min readFeb 9, 2021

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Karen Gilden

The Sunday after

It’s the Sunday morning after President Biden’s inauguration. A steady rain and predictions of snow find me indoors with a feeling of…

2 min readJan 25, 2021

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Karen Gilden

In search of higher ground

Strangely, I woke this morning thinking about a speech Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard in the late 70s. I had written a paper about…

2 min readJan 10, 2021

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Karen Gilden

Early rising

Coming into the living room early this morning I caught a flash of color through the branches of a cedar tree. I went outside and looked…

2 min readAug 4, 2020

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Karen Gilden

Too damn long

I punched the numbers into the microwave timer and pushed Start: 8 minutes, 46 seconds. And then I stood in my kitchen and watched the…

2 min readJun 5, 2020

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Karen Gilden

Life on the curve

I want you to know I washed my hands before setting them on the keyboard. Don’t worry. There may be viruses in your computer but they…

2 min readApr 6, 2020

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Karen Gilden

Alvord

The Alvord Desert is 12 miles long and 7 miles wide (19 x 11 km). Located in the far southeast corner of Oregon at about 4000 feet (1200…

3 min readOct 9, 2019

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Karen Gilden

The Alvord Desert is 12 miles long and 7 miles wide (19 x 11 km).

At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning I woke to the still brightness of the slowly setting harvest moon. It lit the tent like daylight and I…

3 min readSep 17, 2019

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The Alvord Desert is 12 miles long and 7 miles wide (19 x 11 km).

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Karen Gilden

Four hundred years

As you no doubt know, this year marks the 400th anniversary of the introduction of slavery into the United States. I wanted to know more…

2 min readAug 24, 2019

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Karen Gilden

The view from the porch

I had my coffee on the porch this morning but the warming sunshine called so I did three loops around the lake, where there are still baby…

1 min readJun 18, 2019

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Karen Gilden

Karen Gilden

I’m the author of four books, three of which are in print. My latest, published in 2019, is Life in Transition, a book of essays. I live in Portland, Oregon.

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