A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet. Natural inks have been enjoying […]
I have begun to visit the trail behind my house with religious devotion. It switchbacks up a sundrunk slope, mostly melted out from the snow, and tops out at a cliff overlooking the valley where I live. I go because it’s spring, and the smell of thawing soil and sweetening ponderosa bark calls me outside. […]
Touch is how we show our most loved people our care. A medium beyond words to say, I hear you; I’m here for you. One of the cruelest things about this highly contagious virus now sweeping the world is that it steals this language from us when we most need it. Our breath, our hands […]
A partially fictionalized diary of antvasion Sept. 15 Line of small black ants across the kitchen floor. Origin and destination unclear. Some have abdomens cocked upward at a jaunty angle, like ant hotrods. This makes them look more aggressive and hooligany somehow. Gone before noon, as if they had never been. Sept. 16 (Forget about […]
When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the […]
This post originally appeared Feb. 13, 2018 It starts quietly enough. At around 9:30 a.m., I strap snowshoes to my feet and part ways with some friends bound for a backcountry ski. While they skin over a nearby saddle, my dog Taiga and I shuff our way into the stream of snowshoers along the boundary […]