Dear LWON readers, This is California’s only major free-flowing river, 400 miles north of San Francisco in the Klamath Mountains near the northern border with Oregon. That outrageous aquamarine color comes from a rock called serpentinite, which contains a vivid, yellow-green mineral with the equally delightful name of lizardite. Could I see the bottom of […]
I wrote this post in 2019, and am still gobsmacked by flower hormones. Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them. Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a […]
When you’re exceedingly tiny, you can live almost anywhere – in an eyelash follicle, between grains of sand, or on an insect’s wing. You can probably find food and plenty of it, whether you prefer dead skin cells, blood, sap, or rotting vegetation. You can also get away with almost anything, like the male, deep […]
My grandmother used to take me to master classes at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where young musicians from all over the world came to train. After buying our $10 tickets, we’d stand in the line of mostly senior citizens waiting for the doors to open. I’d hold her hand and […]
It’s the spider time of year, the webs are everywhere and the little spiders are sneaking into the house. Sneaking is bad enough but then you learn that some spiders fly — paraglide, actually, crossed with hot-air ballooning. Just no. This post first ran on April 19, 2018. Most spring days on my favorite walk, […]
Note: This post is about suicide, so please skip it if you’re not up for that right now. Last month we lost a friend of ours, a seventeen year-old girl. My first impulse when I got the call was to clean our house. I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing to do, […]
Yesterday I went down to the river with my sister – the only rational activity in this godawful heat wave – and we waded in up to our waists, squinting into the late afternoon sun. We swam until our blood cooled, then perched on a rock midstream, watching the green water spiral away in eddies […]
This post first ran in March 2019. Given the recent though still-dubious claims of sentient AI, it seems like a good time to revisit the brilliant vagaries of AI transcription, which I enjoy lightly (ok sometimes heavily) editing into found poems. P.S. I’ve somewhat fallen out of love with Otter since writing this piece and […]