Songs of Home

By: | September 9, 2019


Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new research tells us. Biologists already knew the scurrying rodents tuned into birds’ alarm calls, but they didn’t realize that the mammals responded to songs about the good times, too. Content chirps suggest to squirrels that all is well. 

To me, too.

At this time of year especially I find that sounds tell a comforting story. Here at the edge of the woods, at my Virginia cabin, late summer stretches and layers the crickets’ songs and deepens the quiet. The breezes are still-warm, breathy farewells to August. Birds, less riotous at the feeder, are choosier with their calls but certainly not silent: While no longer desperate to mate, those that don’t migrate still have territory to claim.

Today a few singular voices are cutting through the crickets’ hum–though I’ll admit I confuse the bluejay’s and the red-shouldered hawk’s caws unless I hear them side by side. Somebody’s crisp piercing note rises above another’s cascading dribble. I don’t know who’s who; clearly, I need to work on my bird IDs. But September’s in progress, these voices tell me: Revel in this transitional world.

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Guest Post: Christine’s Killing Fields

By: | September 6, 2019

Years ago, when I moved into my house, I had a dream. I was going to remove all the grass, destroy the lawn and never have to mow. My yard—nay, my patchwork of service-providing gardens—would offer food for humans and animals, as well as habitat, color and deeply soothing smells. I planted all the clovers—white, red, crimson—to rehab the soil and feed the wild bees. Milkweed for the monarchs. Fennel and dill for me and the swallowtails. Anise goldenrod and bee balm for teas, a fig tree, blueberry bushes, and lots of native species for my poor insect friends who need love now more than ever. The universe laughed.

Just like every year, this spring was magical. The clover smelled amazing, the mayapples were cute, the lavender didn’t die. But then August happened. By the second half of summer, my gardens had become killing fields—invasive plants killing every tender thing I love, and me trying to kill the invasives.

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Actually, Twitter is a biowaste gasification facility

By: | September 5, 2019
It’s a plot to get our precious bodily fluids

“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer observation. He meant it as an indictment of man’s inhumanity to man on the hell site, but by pure chance he may have stumbled upon a useful metaphor for personal data.

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Pets Are Supposed to Make Us Happy. So Why Am I So Worried?

By: | September 2, 2019

My fish died last week. I am not sure how long he lay on the bottom of his aquarium before I noticed. It wouldn’t have been more than a day, because I’d checked on him the previous afternoon. He wasn’t looking good, unmoving except for his gills, which seemed to be straining.

But then Percy (Percival L. Fishington) never looked that good. He liked to stay near the bottom, or hide in his hollow-log toy. He was probably the least engaged, most depressed-seeming betta fish I have ever had. He lived in our house for two and a half years.

Was he depressed? I have kept many fish in my life and the others have not seemed depressed, but I don’t know. It is unknowable. What is it like to be a fish? 

I worry all my creatures are depressed. I worry about my houseplants. In the miniseries “Good Omens,” the character Crowley shouts at his plants to make them grow, and they live in fear of him. (I don’t remember whether this happens in the book.) It’s played for a laugh, and it is funny to watch David Tennant menace a quivering ficus, but it also made me genuinely sad. What if they are scared? What if the plants are sad? Is it my fault?

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The Problem with Stories

By: | August 30, 2019
Sketch by Leonardo DaVinci

Earlier this summer, as I lay with my head on my boyfriend’s chest, I heard something odd. His heart — an efficient athlete’s organ that normally thumps fewer than 50 times per minute at rest— switched from its reassuring, steady bah-buhm, bah-buhm, bah-buhm to rapid staccato: bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. 

I lifted my head and asked if he’d noticed it. Pete said yes, it had happened before, and that sometimes his chest hurt and his arm tingled. I called my dad, a retired physician, and he said Pete should see a doctor as soon as possible. As Pete left for his appointment, I badgered him to not minimize his symptoms: “Make sure you say the words  ‘pain,’ and ‘tingling,’” I said.

It took a while to get the workup scheduled. When she hooked Pete up to monitors on a treadmill to do a stress test, the nurse was incredulous. “You’re too young for this,” she said. Pete is 35 but looks much younger. In fact, he looks so young that I didn’t take him seriously when he first asked me out three years ago, at the start of a long, slow courtship. In May, when we attended graduation at the high school where Pete teaches science, someone mistook him for a student, congratulating him on his achievement.

The point is, Pete looks young and healthy. He is young and healthy. But his blood pressure has been abnormally high since his twenties— high enough that he needs meds — and the doctors don’t know why. Last month they gave Pete a heart monitor and instructed him to wear it for 30 days, to detect any abnormal rhythms. They also performed an echocardiogram, using soundwaves to image his pulsing heart. Two weeks ago, we sat at our kitchen table and opened a bland-looking envelope from the VA Medical Clinic which contained his echocardiogram results. Among the findings, it listed a congenital malformation of the heart called a bicuspid aortic valve.

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I Finished An Abandoned Craft Project (So Proud)

By: | August 29, 2019

I have a bit of a t-shirt problem. I love the graphics. I like how someone at the gym will say, “Hey, I was at that concert, too! Wasn’t it great?” I love wearing something that represents my neighborhood when I’m traveling far away. I love how, every time I take a t-shirt out of the drawer, I remember the event or place where I got it, and how that place made me feel.

T-shirts have their limits, as external memory devices. They wear out. And, no matter how many times I tell myself I have enough t-shirts, they pile up. A reasonable thing to do would be to give them away. And I do, sometimes. But what if I forgot the thing forever? Anyway, nobody wants my old t-shirts.

So I chose shirts that I loved, but didn’t want to wear anymore, and I cut a big square from each one. My mom probably helped; she’s made several quilts. With a sewing machine, I assembled the 49 blocks in rows and columns. Then the sandwich: the sewed-together t-shirts, a layer of fluffy batting, and a piece of backing material. I pulled the whole stack loosely together with long lines of big stitches.

Then I quilted. And quilted. And quilted.

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Summer Feet

By: | August 28, 2019

At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make me cringe even before I step onto the road.

I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?

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