Grief is a persistent little bugger. It never really goes away, just changes shape. Well after my last book came out without the fanfare I’d hoped for, I’m revisiting a version of grief that I hadn’t known existed, and that’s still with me. It’s no long a dart; I’d say it’s more a smattering of […]
Your average frog loves a good meaty fly. But to this amphibian predator, a stationary fly might not register as something worth nabbing, if it is seen at all. “[A frog] will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving,” wrote the authors of a 1959 paper in Proceedings of the IRE […]
Sometimes we change our minds about big life choices: where we live, what career we pursue, who walks beside us. I’ve been pretty consistent so far, especially when it comes to what follows. A friend of mine wants to be donated to a body farm so she can “live again” by being prodded and measured […]
Dueting with animals will always be thrilling for me, and I’ll always envision our melodic conversations filling a sound gap somewhere up there. Enjoy this memory along with me! I had a conversation with an owl the other night. It was a barred owl, a pretty common species in the woods around our cabin in […]
And here we are enduring another wet blast of late summer’s hot breath, a last gasp before fall blows in. This imminent transition of seasons is always a thoughtful time for me, for many of us. Here’s how I was thinking about it a few years ago. Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new […]
I’ve been yammering on here at LWON for long enough now that it’s time for readers to get to know me a little more intimately. That means some introductions are in order. We’ll start strong with my buddy Gus, the Skittle-size hemangioma spooning my liver. As you can imagine, this bundle of excess blood vessels […]
I’m so happy to see these guys year after year, so I’m celebrating them again here on LWON.I don’t know why this came out in “verse,” but here it is. I’m no poet, but I had fun regardless. And if you read it right, it really does scan! Upon my feeder yesterdayA cowbird male did […]
This post from years back still makes me smile. I hope you’ll also enjoy it again! Not every juicy morsel works in every recipe. As a writer, I often come across something meaty, think, HUH! and then drag the link to a rarely visited desktop folder because, you know, I’m not writing a piece about […]
