I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day. And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re […]
Ann
Last winter I was staying with friends who have a dark sky. (I don’t have a dark sky and even on clear nights I can hardly see Orion, which makes me sad but I’m used to it.) It was New Year’s Eve and as usual I bugged out early, went up to the guestroom, adjusted […]
Yesterday we turned 10, which is like 120 in blog years. We’re celebrating all week with postcards we wrote to ourselves in May of 2010. Today Ann, Emma, and Cassie report back on the present to their younger selves, or at least offer a warning. Ann Finkbeiner In May, 2010, I was wondering whether the […]
“It was nothing to just sit on the phone for an hour, wrapped up in those long curly cords,” writes my friend. “An hour-long phone conversation was totally normal. In my teenage years, I could just sit on the phone all night long.” That’s a comforting image, isn’t it — my friend but younger, curled […]
My neighbor likes to ask big questions about big ideas. He’s not pretentious and doesn’t pontificate, so I think he just likes big questions. Anyway, the other day he asked what the necessary components of an ideal public education were. “Writing,” I said, naturally. He agreed partly because, he said, good writing involves good thinking. […]
This morning, mid-January, sandwiched between the past few days of fog and rainy gloom and future days of cold and snowy mix, the sun did this. I’d been having the flu, not getting 5 feet away from the couch, and the sun was so stunning I walked out on the porch and stood in it. […]
Dateline: mid-January, 2020. Location: Baltimore, MD. Meterological conditions: first snow of the season, 1 inch max. Early that evening, rumor apparently came of an imminent invasion. So the local militia began work on fortifications. They packed cold-certified plastic cubes with snow, then pushed the cubes of snow out and stacked them without reference to engineering […]
*Now with UPDATES, below: Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice) is a star, the red one on the left shoulder of Orion. You’ve seen it. One of the whole points of stars is that you can just look up and count on seeing them. The earth turns underneath them so it’s true that depending on time and geography, […]