Thank goodness for ravines that are inconvenient to build on. This one cuts through the suburbs near my parents’ house. You can hear the Beltway from the spot where I took this picture, but the deer wander by anyway, and the squirrels, and the occasional human. Photo: Helen Fields
Month: December 2020
This spring, after weeks of quarantine, my husband was probably already sick of me when I started reading about cicadas. As I ventured further into a Wikipedia wormhole, I shared with him the most interesting tidbits. “Did you know there are multiple broods?” I asked, as he played a game on his phone on the […]
It is a Gamble tradition that each child can select one present to open on Christmas Eve, ahead of the Christmas Day onslaught. On a nature ramble yesterday with my father and me, my son asked if he could open his when we got back to the house, around 2pm. “Christmas Eve,” says I. “The […]
The first recorded sighting of the strange birds occurred in August. A man posted a picture on my Facebook neighborhood group: Plump, chicken-esque body. Red beak. Black-and-white striped wings. Bandit mask over the eyes. Commenters were quick to ID the bird. Definitely a chukar. More photos revealed there were at least five roaming the streets. […]
In this year of darkness, today brings something to celebrate. Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, which means the light will finally start returning. And this year, the first day of winter also marks a special celestial event — the Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction. Imagine that our solar system is a racetrack, and […]
Just down the road from my house, there lived a bull. He had a massive, muscular neck and a glossy black coat that rippled as he strode around the pear orchard that served as his pasture. In fall, when the pears ripened, the bull rubbed against the old trees, shaking their trunks until the fruit […]
Recently Ann wrote that, in the pandemic, she’d been paying attention to “the world that exists when I’m not noticing it, the world that goes on about its own business.” The other day, the world did something fantastic. It passed through the dust from an asteroid, giving us the Geminids. This is apparently one of […]
* Image by Pedro Szekeley, via Flickr/Creative Commons license
