When I was a kid, I pretended I was a bird, and I did it in front of anyone in early elementary school, winging around with my arms outstretched. Around fourth grade I started learning modesty and only soared when no one was watching. The ground, I imagined, was far away, ants the size of […]
Month: March 2026
Many years ago, I wrote the following post after encountering the incredible amount of snails in our garden. In the intervening years, the snails have vanished. Now, my youngest son and I look forward to a particular patch of succulents on the walk to school that, when spring comes, turns into Snail City. It’s been […]
Update: I just found out that I’m talking about two different kinds of crows: I was hearing fish crows — which go krokk, then maybe another krokk, then that’s it — and thinking they were American crows which go caw caw caw and never shut up. Never mind because we’re still presented with the mystery […]
I. One autumn evening several years ago I was driving—I should admit it, I was flying—north on New York state’s Taconic Parkway when I spotted a white tailed deer at the side of the road. It isn’t unusual to see them along the Taconic, especially in the fall, when the rut makes them a little […]
The purity of the unchanged treble loomed large in my English childhood. It might been something to do with the 500-year-old tradition of May Morning, seen here in the earliest known recording. At the tolling of six in the morning, Oxford’s townspeople gather on the street to hear the Magdalen College choir sing Hymnus Eucharisticus […]
Did you ever have to memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales? I did, for high school English class, spring semester of senior year. I was cranky about it—why do we have to recite this stuff?—but as with most things I didn’t want to learn, I’m glad I did. Every springtime I think of the […]
Since I’m still a newbie around here, I jumped at the opportunity to get to know one of my fellow LWONers a little better by interviewing Eric Wagner about his latest book Seabirds as Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, and the View from Destruction Island. I took my cue from Jennifer Holland’s great recent interview with Neil […]
