Yesterday I went down to the river with my sister – the only rational activity in this godawful heat wave – and we waded in up to our waists, squinting into the late afternoon sun. We swam until our blood cooled, then perched on a rock midstream, watching the green water spiral away in eddies […]
This post first ran in March 2019. Given the recent though still-dubious claims of sentient AI, it seems like a good time to revisit the brilliant vagaries of AI transcription, which I enjoy lightly (ok sometimes heavily) editing into found poems. P.S. I’ve somewhat fallen out of love with Otter since writing this piece and […]
This post first ran in July 2019. In 2015, Sarah Grimes picked up this river otter’s carcass on a rugged beach covered in tumbled sea glass. She removed its skin and flesh and soaked its bones first in warm water, then Borax. She kept each section of the skeleton — legs, paws, spine – in […]
With so many details to arrange, planning a wedding can feel overwhelming. Don’t worry! So long as you complete the following tasks in the order listed below, you’ll be just fine. Remember: This is about you, your betrothed, your families, and everyone you’ve ever met or might encounter! It’s possible (though by no means certain) that […]
One of my fears, when I moved back home from DC to my minuscule hometown in a sparsely populated region of California, was that I’d lose what I consider an important modern survival skill: the ability to wait in line politely, or as the British put it, to queue. There were ample opportunities to queue […]
This post first ran in October 2019. Here’s hoping for the glorious return of school talent shows in 2021-22. About a year ago, I attended a high school talent show. It was over two hours long. The multipurpose room smelled of old pizza and pubescent sweat. The folding metal chairs made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, as did […]
(An unauthorized continuation of “Things We Like”) Scattered along the deep ravines and canyons where I live are trees called ghost, or sometimes grey, pines. The trees are scraggly and uncharismatic. “Scarcely in any sense a beautiful tree,” Willis Jepson, one of California’s early botanists, wrote of them in 1901, they give “no comfort of […]
I finally finished Anna Karenina, which means I now understand how gentleman farmer Konstantin Levin felt when, after spending far too much time thinking about farming, he finally just grabs a scythe and starts mowing hay, real hay! That, gentle reader, is how I felt last week when I talked to Leif Nelson, senior author of […]