You want travel to change you. Right? But then you come back home, and it’s back to your regular life, and the smells and sounds and memories and surprises drift away, and there you are, back the way you were. This spring, I spent nearly two months on a pilgrimage, visiting 88 temples on the […]
See those little round plants? The flat ones? They’re ferns. Ferns! Did you even know ferns came like that? Not a frond in sight? Little flat discs? Well, they do! They grow in many, many wet places in Japan, often among the wee mosses and lichens, which means I’d seen them for a long time […]
Look at this worm. Behold it! Is it not the most spectacular worm you have ever seen? If you’re a loyal reader of this space, you saw this exact worm a week or so ago, in my post about Japanese botanist Tomitaro Makino and some of the plants he grew up around. That was the […]
I’m currently on a walking trip in Japan that has turned into more of a walking-plus-bus-and-train trip. (Walking is great! Walking with all of your stuff on your back…is great for some people.) I’m on a pilgrimage that circles the island of Shikoku, visiting 88 temples along the way. Because I’m a nerd, I’ve stopped […]
I am an American citizen, and I don’t look like someone you would stop if you were on the street trying to harass immigrants, but I wasn’t born here. (I’m not an immigrant, either – I just happen to have been born overseas.) I’ve spent about 15% of my life in other countries. And my […]
My mother died at the end of June 2024, a few months after my father. They lived the last 39 years of their lives in a tidy but full house, surrounded by books, photos, treasures, and memories of travels. It took a year and a half to transform the house from a cozy den of […]
My very healthy father died unexpectedly at Thanksgiving in 2023. In what turned out to be the last 3 1/2 years of his life, he and I went on a lot of hikes. My parents lived close to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, and, in the times of pandemic lockdown, it was a […]
Because I’m traveling today, to the annual science writers’ conference, I’ve taken the unusual step of running a guest post without clearing it with the rest of the LWON team. My sweet baby Chihuahua mix T.S. Eliot Nestor (pictured above) asked to respond to Our Jenny’s post this week (Little Dog Big Heart), in which […]
