Last week I read a delightful story about seed catalogs that made me remember this 2012 post. And my seed catalogs! Somewhere along the way, I must have gotten off the catalog lists because not a single one has arrived this winter to help me dream of spring. (Where did I go wrong?!) For now, […]
My dad’s 100th birthday would have been this weekend. 100! It seems incredible—so many years since 1923, so many things that happened in them. How different it must have been, how many things might have been not so different at all. These are the things I think I remember that he told me: behind […]
It is still January, but the plants here don’t seem to know it. The evergreen pear trees along my street burst into flurries of cloud-colored blossoms last weekend. Along my neighbor’s garage, the hedgehog aloe shows off its orange flowers. Elsewhere, there are fingerprints of the recent storms’ destruction: beaches scoured of sand, roads crumbling […]
It is me again, with my hopeful calendars! I originally wrote this post in January 2020, when the calendar did seem like a place where you could write something on a certain date and there would be a reasonable chance that it would come to pass. I feel much more timid now, three years on. […]
I’m time-traveling back to early 2021, when finding pool lane reservations was as tricky as scoring Taylor Swift tickets. For the last few months, I’ve been happily swimming at a pool that I can go to almost any time and find an open lane. Swimming bliss! And then yesterday I found out it will […]
Yesterday was the end of Daylight Saving time here, also called “The Day That Just Won’t End” by assorted family members and friends. So I’ve been thinking about time and watching this frightening movie trailer again. Other times, it’s good when time feels more expansive than it usually does. Even though this post first appeared […]
Bryn Nelson is a Seattle-based science writer whose book, Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure, came out September 13. Yes, that’s right–it’s a book about poop. So of course, Helen and Cameron wanted to take a deep dive into this important (seriously!) topic. Here’s our conversation with Bryn, which has been lightly edited […]