The Last Word On Nothing

It was a week of thanks and turkeys.

Scientists and editors claim not to like anthropomorphizing, but Ann did it anyway. With galaxies. Which breathe. No, really!

Guest Nell Greenfieldboyce watched a spider go about its business in her window for weeks, then wrote about it, and it’s lovely.

Those pronouncements on climate change? They start with people making measurements in very cold places. Craig knows – he’s been there and shoveled the snow.

For Thanksgiving, the People of LWON put pen to paper and expressed our thanks for crows, the sun, and you, Dear Reader.

Erik visited a new museum in Panama and took the opportunity to fill us in on a few million years of romances between the continents.

A week with the winter coming, a week with some excellent words.

Guest Colin Norman started the week with his final post in his thorough, smart, and elegant series, Affair of the Heart.  He’s been through the medical system and come out the other side, more or less intact, certainly better than when he went in.  Now, to pay for it.

A brave, modest, lovely plant with a dubious name, stinking hellebore, blooms in the cold by making its own heat in its nectaries.  Roberta’s a little chilly herself and heads off to the nearest nectary.

Michelle re-reads A Wrinkle in Time, then re-reads it a few more times to her kid.  “It’s a dark and stormy night,” snuggle in and listen. Michelle likes what the book has to say: wander off-planet to your heart’s content, come back home.  Or as L’Engle said, “Tesser well.”

“Go home and put on some proper winter clothes you dumbasses,” Cassie doesn’t yell through her car window.  The dumbasses are young and so have more brown fat than Cassie, who’s cold, cold, cold.  She could do something about that, if she wanted.

Watch a milkweed pod on your walk to work, every day for two months, and you see it go dehiscent.  You also see some unlikely bugs and a fuzzy little epiphany.  I’m going to start walking to work with Helen.