Spider at the Window

By: | November 25, 2014

IMG_4577My first impressions of the spider: It was big and it was smart.

The brownish spider was nearly two inches long. It had constructed a thick, complicated web in the corner of my kitchen window’s frame, outside of the house. On the wall inside, right next to the web, is a light fixture that almost always gets switched on at night.

“Look at this amazing spider!” I told my four-year-old son. He dutifully peered out at the spider huddled against the glass. Then he went back to work on his own web-like creation, a “machine” made of strings that stretched across the room. He had tied the ends to the fridge and the oven and the sink. He was using more string to attach a broom and various pots and pans. His machines often make it difficult for the rest of the family to walk through the house. Continue reading →

Cosmopomorphism

By: | November 24, 2014

30_Doradus,_Tarantula_NebulaI’ve just finished a story about gas and galaxies.  You’re bored already, aren’t  you.  After I’d sent the editor a query about it, he took months to respond and then wanted several rewrites of the query; I think he was bored too.  If gas and galaxies are so boring, why did I want so much to write about them, what was so interesting?  Unfortunately I don’t usually figure that out until after I’ve written the story. But now the story is finished so I know what I think is interesting and unfortunately again, it didn’t make it into the story. Continue reading →

The Last Word, November 17-21, 2014

By: | November 22, 2014

Stinking helleboreA 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.

Two and a Half Months of Milkweed

By: | November 21, 2014

About halfway between my apartment and my office is a community garden.

In a corner of that community garden is a milkweed plant.

Two red and black bugs on a fresh green milkweed pod. I first noticed it in early September, because of the brightly-colored animals crawling all over it. These, I learned from the internet (thanks, internet), are milkweed bugs. They eat milkweed seeds by poking their pokey proboscises into the milkweed pod.

The next time I walked by, the milkweed bugs had been replaced by ladybugs. Continue reading →

Cold Hands, Warm Space Heater

By: | November 20, 2014

8335096827_4717aa9466_kOn my way to the dry cleaners, I passed a gaggle of highschoolers on their way home from class. The high was 16 degrees yesterday, and the wind made it feel like single digits. But most of these students were dressed for a crisp fall day. One kid, some Justin Bieberesque boy on a bike, sported a sweatshirt instead of a jacket. The sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, leaving his forearms exposed. On his hands he wore lime green fingerless gloves. The girl next to him had a light coat that she had failed to button. Gusts of polar wind whipped it to and fro.

“Hell no!” I thought. “Go home and put on some proper winter clothes you dumbasses.” If it hadn’t been so cold I might have rolled down my window and yelled it.

I was stupid once too. In North Dakota, where I grew up, winters were brutal. Yet, as a teen I used to drive half an hour to school in a Dodge with a broken heater. And because it was the era of what my father calls “mall bangs,” I never wore a hat, even on those -20 days when the wind would freeze your nose hairs and steal the air from your lungs. On the coldest days, I might put my lightly gloved hands over my naked ears. Teenagers are idiots. But they also seem to be immune to the cold. Continue reading →

Tesser Well

By: | November 19, 2014

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It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

______

The opening lines of the children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time are never all that far from my mind. As a kid, I loved the book so much that given the chance, I would have crawled inside it and stayed. And this time of year—especially at night, when the wind is blowing and branches are scratching across the windows—I often think of Madeleine L’Engle’s archly purple curtain-raiser and its creepy, cozy promise.

Snuggle in, it says, and listen. Continue reading →

Winter Blooms

By: | November 18, 2014
Stinking hellebore
The stinking hellebore.

Winter is settling in: the air is nippy, branches are bare, and wearing open-toed shoes is now out of the question. During a recent visit to a horticulture centre, though, I was impressed to see that many flowers in their gardens still bloomed. Cheery red blossoms, gold-centered asters, and frilly magenta petals popped against a bleak backdrop of dead stems and grey skies.

As someone who has trouble keeping plants alive under the best of conditions, I’m intrigued by flowers that thrive even in frigid weather. The white blooms of the Christmas rose, for instance, emerge in December. A related plant, less attractively named the stinking hellebore, has pale green, purple-tinged flowers that also grow during the winter.

It turns out that the stinking hellebore relies on a curious mechanism to warm itself up. Inside the plant’s nectaries — the compartments that hold nectar — live thousands of yeast. These microorganisms busily break down the sugar in the nectar, producing heat. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Affair of the Heart: VII: $64,000 Questions

By: | November 17, 2014

3022618543_9ab124cc98_bI spent about seven hours in the operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital being worked on by a highly skilled surgical team, followed by a day in intensive care and five days in regular care. I also had a battery of pre-op and post-op tests and consultations to investigate the aortic aneurysm that put me on the operating table.  When I asked friends to guess how much all that cost, not one estimated less than $100,000.  I probably will never know who came the closest.

I know exactly how much Johns Hopkins and some two dozen surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, cardiologists, and assorted other specialists billed Medicare, the government-sponsored program that provides most of my health coverage: just under $64,000.  And I know how much Medicare paid.  But those sums aren’t the actual costs of the care I received.  Nor do they reflect how much an uninsured patient or a private insurance company would have been billed, though it almost certainly would have been much more than $64,000. Welcome to the bizarre and confusing world of American medical price setting, in which health care providers strive at least to balance their overall costs and payments–and in most cases make a profit–and in which charges vary according to who’s paying. Continue reading →