HOT: Guest Post: Counting Star Swirls

At three o’clock on Friday morning, August 12, I dragged my husband out of bed to go see shooting stars. I suspected it would be a hard sell. We live too close to the city to view all but the most obvious astronomical events from our backyard; we’d have to drive at least a half […]

Guest Post: The Hidden Rites of Spring

On Easter Sunday, between watching videos of puppies frolicking with bunnies and helping neighbor kids hunt for backyard eggs, I spent some time puzzling over the crypto-pagan religious festivals of the first month of spring. The connection, for instance, between chocolate eggs and the resurrection of Jesus Christ; fertility rituals and Virginia ham. And how a triangular cookie — spilling forth […]

Guest Post: When The Ants Win

  It wasn’t just the initial intensity of the pain — a hot, vibrant shard plunging into my metatarsus and radiating up my shinbone — but its duration. From approximately 10 o’clock in the morning, when I stepped barefoot onto a reddish-brown ant in my San Fernando Valley backyard, until well after sunset, the agony […]

Guest Post: The Resilience of The Citified Bobcat

If you were a bobcat, all tufted ears and oblique green eyes and lush spotted coat, you might find a lot to like about life in the Santa Monica Mountains. In the low, rugged range that bisects metropolitan Los Angeles, you would feast on the hordes of rats that frequent the unkempt middens of slovenly humans. You […]

Guest Post: Isis, a Dog Out of Time

WARNING: If you are not up-to-date on the most recently aired episode of Downton Abbey on PBS, and you actually care what happens, read no more. Spoiler, though hardly a shock, within. “I’m worried about Isis,” Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham told his daughter Mary the other night. “She’s not looking too clever.” ‘Tis true: Isis, […]