Late summer makes me think of thunderstorms, baseball and Steve. This post first appeared in 2014. Last weekend there was an unseasonable lightning storm on the coast. Not here (thank goodness, for our dog’s sake), but farther south. More than 1,400 strikes touched down across the region, with 13 people reporting injuries in Los Angeles […]
Confession time: I used to be a peach hater. What was wrong with me? It’s a question I often find myself asking, too. Part of it was the pit. When I first saw a peach cut open, I was a kid. It was summer, and I was at a swimming pool. The pit looked like […]
Each June, I revisit a post about June Gloom, a weather phenomenon that turns much anticipated summer sunshine into foggy despair. You thought you were safe this year, but no! Our gloom was so deep it started in May and lasted all day, every day. Now it’s July, and there is light at the end […]
The words you are reading have been typed by my own fingers, pressing little keys that make letters on my screen. If you really want to get into it, my keyboard is a little bit dirty. I don’t clean it often enough, and my kids use it a lot (I tell them to wash their […]
Millions of years ago, there they were. Floating around, taking in the sights as much as a single-celled organism can, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, supporting the food chain—diatoms did all the things that they still do now. And then, they died. When they died, they drifted down to the bottoms of lakes and […]
Despite having spent many years eating I still have much to learn about cooking. For example, I did not know there was any particular technique needed to fry an egg. When my husband walked my oldest son through the steps of egg frying, it was a night full of revelations—and not just for the intended […]
We camped this past weekend at Big Sur, meeting up with some friends from the north. I made the reservations in November and wasn’t really looking at the calendar, so I didn’t realize that the weekend was a nexus of holidays—Passover, Easter, Earth Day. It felt right, though, being under the trees and in the […]
Cameron: Helen! It is I, the high school state debate champion of 2009, here to have another vicious argument with you. Although there are many things about that sentence that are not true, and even grammatically incorrect. Helen: Oooooh this is exciting. And slightly scary.