The Last Word

December 26 – 30, 2016 Last week, Craig’s house lost power. And in the darkness, Craig reclaimed the winter: I turned the place into a constellation of oil lamps and candles. The wood stove flickers, sending shadows across the globe and behind the rocking chair. This feels like the best way to witness the heart of winter rise up […]

Redux: Water Year

This post first appeared on October 8, 2015, when I was still hopeful that a good strong El Nino could hold off California’s water problems a while longer. Where I am, it didn’t work. One of our reservoirs is now at 7 percent capacity. At another, the dam worker now needs water trucked in to […]

The Last Word

December 5-9. 2016 At a writing residency in Oregon, Emma finds a bird foot in coyote scat, and then sees death all around her in the forest. When I stopped for lunch, I took out my notebook and wrote, “Thinking mostly about nothing much except how the forest is death, death, life out of death, death accumulated so it […]

A Tale of Two Fish

I am taking care of two fish this weekend. One is a nice, respectable goldfish. It’s orange and black, it lives alone in a bubbling tank with some seaweed and a little fake wooden log to swim through. It eats a few pellets of food every few days. The other has three eyes, and it […]

The Last Word

October 31 – November 4, 2016 On Monday, our Tom Hayden reflects on sharing his name with the other Tom Hayden, who died last week. Guest Laura Paskus has been trying to avoid the election. But the kids are asking questions—ones that maybe all of us should have to answer. Say your friend is being […]

TGIPF: The Seven-Arm Octopus

I’ve written about cephalopod penises before, but the time seems right to approach this subject (with extreme caution) again. You know, because it’s Friday. The octopus and the number eight seem inseparable. We have read children’s counting books that feature this cephalopod prominently between pages 7 and 9; we flip through under-the-sea books that rhyme […]

Bug Love Redux: Wonder TK

The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation.  That way they’ll all be in one place. This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs. I wrote my […]

Pablo, Pablo and me

I’ve always had mixed feelings about tracking animals with satellite tags. It’s so cool that we can now see where creatures go, sometimes moment-by-moment, but I wonder about losing a bit of the mystery that surrounds some of their lives. (In the animal uprising, privacy issues may be high on their long list of injustices.) […]