I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past lately. As I get my parents’ house ready for sale, I’ve been looking at decades of memorabilia. A dozen or so boxes of my own memories lived in the attic, and the above picture is one of them: a list of things that surprised me […]
Month: August 2025
I love listening to people speak a language unfamiliar to me. I mean, it’s delightful to hear one of the romance languages rattled off a tongue, and it’s nice when the brain dips into the ratty old pocket labeled “high-school French” to tell you what it means. But I’m talking about not knowing a single […]
We’re sorry, we should have introduced you to this sterling new Person of LWON before he posted his first post but to our dismay, we’re now doing it late and to our pleasure we’re doing it now. So please, meet (have met) Neil Shea. He started out as a photographer and when all that equipment […]
Time is escaping me today. What day is this, anyway? This post first ran in February of 2016, and this morning I landed in Frankfurt, Germany, after a chain of cancelled and delayed flights from Colorado, which has my head swimming. What day is this, anyway, is a real question. It turns out to be […]
Have you heard about “zombie squirrels”? These squirrels, suffering from squirrel fibroma virus, grow strange-looking sores all over their bodies. In most cases, they recover from the virus. Still, I feel badly for them. It looks uncomfortable, even if they are not actually zombies. I do not feel badly for this squirrel. I saw it […]
This first ran on August 17, 2022. Three years later, August 20, 2025, same. Except this year we also have infrastructure, (it’s like measles: you get it, you suffer, it goes away) which we have often enough that I know code for the street markings: gas is yellow, electric is red, sewer is green, water […]
This post originally appeared in May of 2020. A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta […]
Hello, LWON community! I’m new to the blog, and I’m thrilled to be included in this excellent company of writers and readers. I hope you’ll enjoy my first post. ——— Lauren drew her feet up slowly from the water and gave me a look somewhere between worry and wonder. It was late afternoon, and we […]
