It’s fig season again! This post first ran in October 2019. Now we have a squirrel who I’m competing with to get the ripe ones off our bigger tree. And our little tree? It’s still little, with about six figs and two leafy branches. Maybe I’m imagining it, but the branches seem a little stronger […]
Food/Drink
This week Elise and I completed one of our lives’ great adventures, the John Muir Trail, the legendary footpath that wends along the granitic spine of California’s Sierra Nevadas. In point of fact it’s more accurate to say that she completed it, walking virtually the entire 200-mile course from Yosemite National Park to Mount Whitney’s […]
Next in the penspective series is something I recently ate. First, is it organic or manufactured? Don’t scroll down to see the pen for scale. Let your imagination wander. It looks marine to me, like an anemone bed, little feelers reaching up. Or the bristles of a scrubbing device made of plastic, which I can’t […]
Early on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, my son and I headed out to hunt for morel mushrooms, which are pretty elusive here in New England. Though I’ve searched for them a bit the past few years, I have never yet found them. But I could see from a steady flow of photos […]
I. We’ve been slowly cutting back on meat. It’s better for us and better for the planet. Not to mention the exploited workers on the factory farms—did you see that John Oliver segment? After it came out, we said let’s take things one step further: No more buying meat for our household from the grocery […]
When, years from now, I reflect on the debacle that was 2020, I will remember it for COVID, of course, and for its possibly planet-saving election; but I will also recall it as the Year of the Fire Tower. Decommissioned fire lookout towers stipple ridgelines across the West, many of which can be rented for […]
The kitschiest town in Washington nestles in the Cascades, two hours east of Seattle and three west of Spokane, where the Wenatchee River elbows its way through a cleft in snow-veined mountains. This is the picturesque home of Leavenworth, a faux-Bavarian town that has gone all-in on a year-round Oktoberfest vibe. The ersatz chalets boast […]
A partially fictionalized diary of antvasion Sept. 15 Line of small black ants across the kitchen floor. Origin and destination unclear. Some have abdomens cocked upward at a jaunty angle, like ant hotrods. This makes them look more aggressive and hooligany somehow. Gone before noon, as if they had never been. Sept. 16 (Forget about […]