One of my fears, when I moved back home from DC to my minuscule hometown in a sparsely populated region of California, was that I’d lose what I consider an important modern survival skill: the ability to wait in line politely, or as the British put it, to queue. There were ample opportunities to queue […]
This post first ran in October 2019. Here’s hoping for the glorious return of school talent shows in 2021-22. About a year ago, I attended a high school talent show. It was over two hours long. The multipurpose room smelled of old pizza and pubescent sweat. The folding metal chairs made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, as did […]
(An unauthorized continuation of “Things We Like”) Scattered along the deep ravines and canyons where I live are trees called ghost, or sometimes grey, pines. The trees are scraggly and uncharismatic. “Scarcely in any sense a beautiful tree,” Willis Jepson, one of California’s early botanists, wrote of them in 1901, they give “no comfort of […]
I finally finished Anna Karenina, which means I now understand how gentleman farmer Konstantin Levin felt when, after spending far too much time thinking about farming, he finally just grabs a scythe and starts mowing hay, real hay! That, gentle reader, is how I felt last week when I talked to Leif Nelson, senior author of […]
In 1861, a 45-day-long rainstorm hit California, causing the largest flood in our state’s recorded history. It created an inland lake 300 miles long in the Central Valley, and drowned roughly 200,000 cows. Governor Leland Stanford had to attend his inauguration by rowboat, and the state went bankrupt. In an effort to escape future flood […]
All weekend I’ve been trying to write an article about oak trees for a rapidly approaching deadline, and not making much headway. I know what the problem is: Oaks aren’t a story, they’re too branched and sprawling, and I still need a path to follow through the woodland, or an acorn for distractable squirrel readers […]
(A poem for the evacuees. Pete and I are safe.) At the rummage sale at the end of the world, you don’t have to pay for anything. Strangers disgorge their closets for you: Dirty tennis shoes, used underwear, new dresses from Ann Taylor with the tags still attached. You rifle through the clothes, trying to ignore […]
It’s tricky, trying to understand a crisis when you’re in it. How invasive it can feel to read apocalyptic headlines about your home, like having overwrought, uninvited strangers show up to a family funeral. So terrible, so shocking, people say, snapping photos. People are sorry about the wildfires ravaging northern California right now, again, but […]