How the Pandemic Turned Working Moms into Mommy Pig

I first published this post in April, 2020. Today things are better, but not fixed. We have childcare, but it feels precarious. There are snow days and teacher training days and holidays and sick days. So Many Sick Days. On Mondays, public school ends at 1:45pm. ONE FORTY-FIVE! And there are still too many things […]

Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret: Micropoems

For years, now, I’ve had a scrap of digital paper on my computer desktop with four words on it: Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret. A memorial to an extraordinary life. A reminder to channel the legendary little animal’s spirit into something strange and new. Little poems, perhaps. And, now, finally, I have. But first: her story. […]

Thanks for All the Snow

I took a train with my high school kid to Salt Lake City for a little urban immersion on Winter Break. We disembarked at 2:30 in the morning in a city experiencing what some said was the biggest blizzard they’d seen in a decade. That early morning, with packs on our backs, we walked into […]

Postcard from a great height

Dear LWON readers, This is California’s only major free-flowing river, 400 miles north of San Francisco in the Klamath Mountains near the northern border with Oregon. That outrageous aquamarine color comes from a rock called serpentinite, which contains a vivid, yellow-green mineral with the equally delightful name of lizardite. Could I see the bottom of […]

The Corvids in Your Neighborhood

Ravens do not generally hang around in my neighborhood, here in northwest Washington, D.C. The common raven lives in a lot of places – much of Europe and Asia; most of Canada, the western U.S. and Mexico; south into Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. According to the map on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Common Raven […]