It’s Roasted Tomato Season, Motherfuckers

With apologies to Colin Nissan. I don’t know about you, but I have been waiting all year to wrap my hands around some tasty, tender tomatoes and arrange them in colorful patterns on my kitchen counter.  That shit is going to look like the embodiment of late summer. I’m dusting off my harvesting baskets and […]

Fig of My Imagination

When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the […]

All Hail the Diatom

Millions of years ago, there they were. Floating around, taking in the sights as much as a single-celled organism can, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, supporting the food chain—diatoms did all the things that they still do now. And then, they died.   When they died, they drifted down to the bottoms of lakes and […]

Snark Week: American Carnage

The murders began, as they usually do, with the coleus. I had walked out my front door on that May morning to sit on my porch swing. But I saw immediately that something was wrong, very wrong. Soil was spattered everywhere. A telltale sign of a massacre, as I knew from experience. Dark-chocolate dirt, flecked […]

Feral daffodils

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud  by William Wordsworth   I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.   Continuous as the stars that […]