I love listening to people speak a language unfamiliar to me. I mean, it’s delightful to hear one of the romance languages rattled off a tongue, and it’s nice when the brain dips into the ratty old pocket labeled “high-school French” to tell you what it means. But I’m talking about not knowing a single […]
I’ve always wanted a crow friend, and this summer I’ve been making an effort. Each morning I put a handful of dog kibble on a paper plate and set it out on our back-patio table. I also ball up a piece of aluminum foil to add to the plate for decoration, although whether crows and […]
When you hear the words “big green apple,” can you picture the fruit in your mind? Or is it represented some other way rather than as a vivid, or perhaps less vivid but still identifiable, visual image? I think most of us assume we all have the same ability to “see” beyond our eyes, to […]
I was sipping my second cup of coffee the other morning when I got this call: “Hi Jenny, this is Dr. Menon’s office. You need to go to the ER immediately. You have a pulmonary embolism.” Pulmonary embolism? Isn’t that the thing where the old guy down the street gets shepherded away in an ambulance […]
Can I just say this? Those of us born in the 1960s and ‘70s are in a special hell right now. With jobs being taken away and careers being cut short and talents losing out to “influencers” and AI and Bots that Chat, it’s been a uniquely painful time. Those in my generation who chose […]
I always knew flying squirrels lived among us, probably of the southern variety, in the trees at our cabin-in-the-woods in central Virginia. But those buggers are hard to spot. They’re night-owls, first of all, and they’re pretty small. So, I was delighted to see a whole nest of them in our woodshed this winter. (Okay, […]
With California once again burning, I keep wondering, if those fires were coming our way, what would I save? I remember my cousin who, years ago, lost her house during a summer of flames; she’d been away from home when it burned, so there was no frantic effort to stuff the car with keepsakes. After […]
As I was researching and writing DOG SMART, trying to understand what it means to think like a dog and experience the world as a dog, I had an epiphany of sorts: Dogs around the world wandering the streets—the “village” dogs you are bound to see roaming here and there, often with a few pals, […]
