I like to run this post on Memorial Day; it first ran May 28, 2012. When I think about soldiers and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy, I’m not sure why — maybe because he stood so straight, not because he ever talked about the war, which he didn’t. Probably, though, it’s because of […]
Month: May 2021
This originally ran August 4, 2017. There is a difference between the two. In one you can’t get lost; one way in, one way out. The other is full of dead ends and false passages. I take my kids to labyrinths. When they were little, we walked in socks along the path of a smooth […]
The anniversary week of George Floyd’s murder is a good time to revisit this post, which first appeared June 10, 2020. We still have so far to go, in the United States.
Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants. After hearing […]
After my disappointment last week I am so glad to say: The 17-year cicadas have arrived. They’re here! We have bugs. The good people of the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang explained that the cool weather has hurt the cicadas. A lot came out when it was too cold for them to molt properly. And, […]
What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my disbelief already, even in real life, and I shrug at the magic imagined in these stories. This […]
Consistent with my policy of running posts that take me, virtually anyway, out of the pandemic present to somewhere or sometime that’s interesting and wide-angle, I offer you the Chesapeake Bay: born in violence, growing up geologically and then sociologically, and now hitting the present with utter tomfoolery. And revelation. This first ran March 31, […]
Tuesday evening, May 11 It’s the biological event of the decade, and it’s almost here. The cicadas that have spent the last 17 years underground as nymphs, feeding on tree roots, are beginning to emerge. For the last few days, I’ve been seeing friends’ posts on Facebook, of those red-eyed 17-year cicadas, in neighborhoods only […]
