Let’s call the thoroughfare I live on Lemon Grove. There are two signs for it, one at each end of our block. Until very recently, one of the signs read, “Lemon Grove Avenue”. The other said, “Lemon Grove Street”. When someone asks for my address, I usually don’t say either. I just say I live […]
This post originally ran last summer. This summer, we tried to do better–we only planted two squash plants. Still, we went to dinner at a friend’s house last night and left behind a very large zucchini. At dinner for my 18th birthday, one of my friends gave me one of those long, narrow posters filled […]
When I turned on my phone over the weekend after a blissful week without cell service, I got an increasingly alarming series of messages from friends at home. A fire broke out near where I’m dogsitting If I get evacuated can I bring the dogs I am going to text your mom I’m evacuating my […]
This weekend my oldest son held two brown eggs in his hand. He cradled them gently. Then he threw one on the ground. It bounced, and he laughed. This one was rubber. The other egg he held was a real one. I’ve never gotten used to the fake egg. Sometimes it appears in egg cartons. […]
I usually avoid talking to people at the gym. But a few weeks ago, the man next to me had his shoes untied, and I couldn’t help myself. The laces were bright red, and extremely long. He was doing side steps that looked like they had high trip potential. And I was extra-sensitive to falls […]
May 14-18, 2018 To start the week, Emma has some good news: butterflies are adapting more nimbly to the Anthropocene that some might have thought. This happy ending surprised the researchers. “Our mindset in 2014 was simply to reconfirm the extinction, and we were very surprised to find larvae,” they write. To be fair, ecologists […]
April 23-27, 2018 Rose starts the week gathering some ideas on creativity, like so many eels. How does one catch eels? Bare handed? Do I design myself some gloves? Or some kind of hunting stick, or camera trap? Maybe I should sing to the eels, to make them feel safe. I need to become an […]
March 19-23, 2018 Sarah knows so many lovely words, and on Monday, writes about learning even more. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at […]