“It’s made of solid iron, it weighs a ton or two, we know you’d like to meet it, it wants to meet you too!” – The Anvil Song, Animaniacs My friend Brian spends a lot of time in a marvelous, mostly empty old barn. The barn is everything a barn should be – high wooden […]
Notre Dame is on fire! one of my oldest friends, Jessica, texted me from New York the morning of April 15th. I saw. So awful, I typed back. Then I lost cell service. Pete and I were driving toward Yosemite, taking advantage of his spring break from teaching high school to explore the park. After paying […]
Summer is coming. In a few months the foothills surrounding my home will turn blonde, then grey. Streams will dwindle, then peter out. After fire season begins, everything will be covered in ash. That’s the reality of summer in the Sierra Nevada foothills these days. But right now it’s spring, and what a spring. The […]
Like most journalists, I dread transcribing interviews. I can’t afford to pay other people to do it, so I’ve been experimenting with computer programs that use artificial intelligence to transcribe for me. Last week I tried one of the more advanced transcription programs, Otter, and its performance was nearly flawless. I felt an odd sense […]
“I’m not going to do a damn thing to help you,” the old man said, glaring at me across the boat with bloodshot eyes. “I’ve been usurped.” I stared back, speechless. We were moving fast downriver toward a churning brown rapid that could swallow our boat whole. Bob was refusing to help me tie up our raft on […]
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 corner for a week, then a month. By the time I opened the bags […]
In the fall of 1969, somewhere in Ohio, scientists put a numbered plastic tag around the leg of a one year-old, female Canada goose, and released it into the wild. When it was eventually shot down in Ontario, in 2001, it was 33 years old — the oldest Canada goose to be recorded in the United States Geological Survey’s archive of bird longevity. […]
“This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with […]