Life’s Seasons Change

My Dad’s birthday is this weekend, and just as I did last year, I’m going to Albuquerque to celebrate with him. Last year, I drove down the day after my second covid vaccine and it felt like the world was on the verge of returning to normal.  We celebrated Dad’s birthday last year on the […]

Why I’m Smiling in a Megadrought

We had a doozy of a snowfall last week in southwest Colorado, the high desert blanketed a foot and a half deep, the mountains getting a good four feet. Knock on wood, I don’t like to tempt the fates of nature and climate change, and I’m not meaning to brag, I just want to celebrate […]

The Artifice of Mondays

I am not especially fond of Mondays and I never have been, at least since learning of the existence of this artifice. I use the word not to mean fake — because Mondays are quite real — but to define them as made by human hands. In the rest of the universe with its whirling […]

Following Shadows Around the Room

Daylight Savings Time swapped out almost a month ago and I’m still off kilter. Who thought of such an assault on the senses? We’re sapiens and all, masters of adaptation, but mind and body don’t like to be parted. I prefer watching light shift day by day, squares of sunshine stepping forward and back across […]

Finding My Friend’s Unwritten Poems

For as long as I’ve known her, my best friend has written a poem each day and then sent it out into the world. For more than a dozen years, she wrote a daily poem. On the day her teenage son ended his life, she stopped.  I’d grown accustomed to opening Rosemerry’s poems in my […]

Doom and the dogmometer

As we head into wave after wave of 100+ degrees Farhenheit temperatures in my home valley in Washington, this post from 2017 seemed worth re-upping: One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall […]

No Privacy for the Dead

The other day I was going through someone’s collapsed house on the tip of a mesa in western Colorado. It looked like a small homestead where no one had been in a handful of decades. The front wall with its peaked roof and door still latched shut lay flat where it had fallen. I poked […]

Y’all Need this Word

Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants. After hearing […]