God damn it, advertising can be powerful. I mean, not that I would ever buy some stupid crap because I saw it advertised on TikTok, of all platforms…that place is rife with over-hyped junk and over-painted hawkers (the term “influencer” makes my toes curl, no joke) and I’m not pathetic enough to fall for their BS.
Until I was. What got me: It was the yummy sounding scents that mean spring and sunshine and a breeze up your skirt. It was the arty images of grasses waving and glitter on the water and dandelion seeds in her hair. Damn it if a company that makes earthy perfumes didn’t grab me and hold me down and whisper sweet nothings against my forehead while I typed my credit card number into their website.
It came as a surprise, a gift from no one in particular: a blush-pink postcard tucked beneath the bottle of sunscreen in my Sephora order, emblazoned with an utterly mystifying collection of words.
HANGOVERx PILLOW BALM
(What?)
We LOVE your lips even when you don’t
(What?)
Infused with mineral-rich stardust
(WHAT?)
The shiny pink button affixed to the card was, I realized, a sample of the product. I turned the card over and was rewarded with a wall of cramped text and new levels of confusion.
This luxuriously rich and creamy balm is infused with an ultra-charged blend of minerals sourced from real FALLING STARS and a nourishing complex of fruit oils, conditioning butters, coconut water and plumping hyaluronic acid for pillowy soft, ultra hydrated, replenished lips.
The ingredient list was significantly smaller, nearly requiring a magnifying glass to read. But there it was, after the nourishing fruit oils and C12-15 alkyl benzoate:
It was 60 years ago today that the Beatles first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” This post originally ran in 2012.
I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” the other night when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, and the camera cut to curtains flying apart with an abandon that matched the song’s first notes, already slamming away. Then Paul stepped to the microphone and opened his mouth.
“[ ], she was [ ] seventeen, you know what I mean.”
But Paul recovered quickly. He bent closer to the microphone, so that now we could at least make out all the lyrics, even if the instruments were still overwhelming them.
Then John stepped forward toward his own microphone. Was his at the wrong height, too? Continue reading →
“It is with the deepest sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of your son Norman. He died after an encounter with a lion near the Keito River in Portuguese West Africa 10/5/15. He made a very gallant fight and killed the lion with his knife after a severe struggle. He was serving as scout in the N. Rhodesian forces to which I also belong.”
So begins a letter from the closest friend (and executor, of which more later) of my great-great uncle Norman Sinclair. Having fought through the Boer War and stayed on in Africa as a hunter, the Scotsman was still in his twenties when he met his unusual end during WWI. A collection of his letters, along with the Dead Man’s Penny — made for all troops who died in the war, and ironically bearing the image of Brittania and a lion — were kept by Norman’s grieving mother and came into my own mother’s hands a few years ago. She was able to trace the story through official and informal accounts, all the way to his twice-exhumed and reinterred grave, now in Dar Es Salaam. Continue reading →
Thomas Snow Beck, ‘On the Nerves of the Uterus’, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1846: Gravid uterus at the ninth month of pregnancy.
This week we had our 22-week ultrasound, the detailed scan for all the things no one wants to think about: cysts in the brain, malformed heart chambers, exposed vertebrae. Will (we’ve started calling him Will) is moving a lot now, rotating and arching his back, kicking his legs and arms. In my mind he’s like a boulder in one of the flash floods carving up California’s hillsides right now: gaining mass as he plummets downhill, the gravitational pull between us rapidly increasing.
I’ve been hearing a lot about what’s impossible for human mothers: showers, sleep, exercise, “a single uninterrupted thought.” It stresses me out, so instead of setting up a baby registry or figuring how we’ll afford childcare, I’ve been escaping by learning about reproduction in other species. For example: pregnant bats. How do they fly?
We often celebrate the beginnings of things, and the ends of things, but what about the middles? The middle can be a gray place, either boring or too eventful in all the wrong ways. That’s what this part of the year feels like to me– I’m missing the cozy days of early winter, where candles are a welcome novelty, when the early dark gives you reason to curl up with a book for an evening. Now, the days are a little longer, but not long enough for me to really enjoy the extra hours of daylight, only enough so that I feel like I’m struggling to keep up.
There’s a little bit of what could be hope out there—a handful of pear trees have started to push out white blossoms—but looming right behind them is an atmospheric river coming to grab the flowers by the fistful and smash them into the street. We’re just hovering here between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and sometimes it feels like this is the year the balance just won’t tip toward the light. No wonder Punxsutawney Phil has trouble predicting how soon spring will come, when, like the rest of us, the groundhog is stuck in the middle of winter. (The groundhog’s forecasts, NOAA reports, have been right about 40 percent of the time during the last 10 years.)
Of course, the in-between time could also be the beginning of something else. In Ireland, St. Brigid’s Day on February 1—which started as the Celtic festival of Imbolc—marked the beginning of spring and the lambing season. I wonder how differently I’d feel if I considered this moment in the calendar to be spring—would it feel more welcome in its unsettledness?
Years ago, Carol Evans, then a Bureau of Land Management biologist in northeastern Nevada, told me she wanted to write a book called Stream Stories — a series ofvignettesabout the many creeks that webbed her region and defined her career. I have no idea if she’s working on this today (Carol, if you’re reading this, I hope you are!), but it always struck me as a brilliant premise. Streams and narratives have much in common: they flow between points yet never truly end, they are subject to the forces of history yet shape it themselves. And they both have protagonists — in the streams’ case, the living beings who dwell within them and, in some cases, sculpt their physical form.
Here, then, is my stab at a brief stream story, featuring a waterway called Sevenmile Creek. And, like so many good stream stories, it co-stars beavers.
Sevenmile Creek runs down a shoulder of scraggly pinyon-juniper forest that looms above Buena Vista, Colorado, a town on the banks of the Arkansas River. For the last several years, Sevenmile’s flow has been diminishing, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — drought, perhaps, or some subtle change in hydrology or land use. Regardless, the dwindling water has spelled trouble for its resident beavers, which, though capable of transforming even the thinnest streams into robust ponds, can’t conjure water from thin air.
One January morning, I paid Sevenmile’s beavers a visit with Mark Beardsley, Cat Beardsley, and Jessica Doran, three beaver aficionados who restore Colorado streams under the banner of a company called EcoMetrics. We walked a couple of miles down one of the gazillion rutted dirt roads that cuts across public land in this corner of Colorado, our dogs weaving around our ankles. Distant coyotes yipped and wailed.
When the road reached Sevenmile Creek, we found it had gone virtually dry. A stranded beaver lodge, its normally submerged entrances yawning like cave mouths, stood in a damp meadow, the crumbling ruins of an ancient kingdom. I felt a twinge of foreboding.
I have had occasion to mention January before, once with hard eyes and grit and once with faith and hope. I mean, it needs both, doesn’t it. Another option is always to become one with the cold, dark skies.
You finally get through the infinite holiday season, think you can relax for a minute, and there’s January. For instance, coinciding with the new year was a leak in the gas main running down the street outside my house. It’s all underground but the gas filtered through the ground, followed the water mains, and drifted up to the surface and then through the air, finally so obvious that not only were the neighbors reporting it but so were random people walking though the neighborhood. And with every report — eight of them — the gas company has to send out a technician who walks around with sensors and makes alarming marks on the ground and asks to inspect your basement in case you’re about to be blown to kingdom come. Luckily, I never was. And finally they sent out a team who looked like construction workers ready to become a bomb squad, dug up my sidewalk and down to China, and fixed it.
Which was just in time, a week or more later, for the yearly water main break to whose early signs I am now fully alert: water runs down the street, it’s not raining, you look for where the water is coming from, and it’s just oozing up through the asphalt. And in a mere matter of time, that water will carry away enough underground ground, and the street will cave in. Luckily this time it didn’t. And they sent out a construction team who can see in the dark, dug up the street and down to China, and fixed it.
UPDATE: A geyser has just blown up, like 10, 20 feet straight up, in the middle of a cross street around the corner. I mean, jeez.
A person could think this all was due to Baltimore’s 19th century infrastructure, which responds catastrophically to cold snaps. But the temperatures were unusually mild. The cold snap didn’t come until after the infrastructure go fixed and it came accompanied with the 5 or 6 inches of snow that now wouldn’t melt. And I’m thinking that once again, the fault is January. It’s a dreadful month. So that’s me complaining again, tired of facing life with courage and realism.
