Last week: kind of a weird one. It was windy, which always makes more than the air feel unsettled. One afternoon a neighbor knocked on the door to say a skunk was stumbling around in the front yard in broad daylight. An hour earlier, one of my kids ran into a pole and went to […]
Nature
In spring 2021, I wrote about my pandemic obsession with my echium plant. I realized how happy this plant made me, so now I’ve got several all over the yard, in different stages of their spiky lives. A few days ago, I noticed that one of them was starting to make that skyward move that […]
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 […]
In 2019, a forest caught fire in Sussex, England. This would not have made international headlines, except that the forest in question was Ashdown Forest, the real-life inspiration for Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin’s beloved Hundred Acre Wood. As the fire spread, dry-eyed forest rangers explained to reporters that the blaze and the little […]
There is a lake not far from where I live now. I’m not a person who has ever invested deeply in place; I am a child of immigrants and I have always been somewhere temporarily. I don’t know the place where I was born, and as much as I love my hometown, I always knew […]
This post originally published in May of 2015, which, considering the age of the Bering Land Bridge, wasn’t that long ago. During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force telecommunications network was erected in Western Alaska, a series of gray metal radio-towers like obelisks on a hilltop over the town of Nome. Each points a […]
I go down to the shore in the morningand depending on the hour the wavesare rolling in or moving out,and I say, oh, I am miserable,what shall —what should I do? And the sea saysin its lovely voice:Excuse me, I have work to do. (Mary Oliver, “I Go Down to the Shore”) You can listen […]
One of the great pleasures of the pandemic era has been going on hikes with my dad. We live in the Washington, D.C. area. When you think of this area, you may not think of hiking. But my parents live quite close to an undeveloped ravine with beautiful tall trees, kingfishers, and the occasional Common […]