Good to Go

Christie’s new book about recovery is out today! It’s called Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. If you are an athlete, you will love it. If you are a wannabe athlete or a science writer or a person, you will still love it […]

Orchid Care for the Uncertain

I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly once I look at my phone. There are a series of misunderstood texts, frail disjointed things that have good intentions but poor phrasing, or lack the perfect emoji. My phone is sitting right next to an orchid. It’s a new type of […]

Redux: Naturalist Without a Notebook

Once again, I was thinking that this year would be my year to keep a journal. Or a calendar. I spent a lot of time looking at various new options online, thinking that perhaps some clean fresh pages in a new format would help. Then I remembered this post, which first appeared in 2014. One […]

Little Lights

It is the time of year for little lights. There are tiny points of light along the eaves of our neighbors’ houses. There are lights along the city streets, too. Some are arranged in a pattern so they look like dolphins. Some are shaped like shooting stars. On Sunday, some houses began to light the […]

Under the Knife

On Sunday we sat outside on the sidewalk and carved our pumpkins. As we worked, we reminisced about past pumpkin carving sessions. My mom and my brother and I used to carve them on the kitchen floor, on the rectangle squares of linoleum. My husband and his sister used to carve their pumpkins in the […]

Green

It’s embarrassing enough that it took me 12 years to go to Channel Islands National Park, especially since I see the islands almost every day. Last month, I got on board the dive boat that would take us to the place they call the Galapagos of North America. At last! The captain said something about […]

Time Will Tell

Sometimes I lose track of time when I’m in the water. There are days when it seems like I’ve been paddling through whitewater for hours, the wind makes my ears feel like icicles, and my arms are burning. When I get back to the car, only fifteen minutes have passed since I started surfing. Then […]