When I turned on my phone over the weekend after a blissful week without cell service, I got an increasingly alarming series of messages from friends at home. A fire broke out near where I’m dogsitting If I get evacuated can I bring the dogs I am going to text your mom I’m evacuating my […]
Cameron
This weekend my oldest son held two brown eggs in his hand. He cradled them gently. Then he threw one on the ground. It bounced, and he laughed. This one was rubber. The other egg he held was a real one. I’ve never gotten used to the fake egg. Sometimes it appears in egg cartons. […]
I usually avoid talking to people at the gym. But a few weeks ago, the man next to me had his shoes untied, and I couldn’t help myself. The laces were bright red, and extremely long. He was doing side steps that looked like they had high trip potential. And I was extra-sensitive to falls […]
Erik wonders if the nonsense words that populate the best children’s books are a good idea when your kid is already tasked with learning two languages. “Someday he’ll learn the words “muggle,” “orc,” “Ewok,” Klingon,” “melange,” and “thoughtful lawmaker,” none of which are real,” he writes, prompting many assurances in the comments that “melange” is […]
There’s a quote I’ve seen attributed to Ram Dass about why we should turn people into trees. When we look at people (or ourselves), we judge. We compare. We criticize. But for trees, Ram Dass says, it’s different. “Some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, […]
Two years ago, I wrote a post about learning how to make fire with a bow drill, and how it was one of the many frustrating things about fire: that it’s hard to make when you need it, and hard to get rid of when you don’t want it to burn. Now yet another California […]
I felt so successful this weekend. I cleaned out multiple closets, filled bags with clothes that I’ve been keeping since college, organized the box of “just-in-case” kid coloring books and trinkets that I save for emergencies. When I open the closet in the morning, there’s a neat row of clothes hanging in a line, […]
I wrote this post in 2014 after my kids were playing around a large eucalyptus tree in a nearby park. After writing it, I became much more fond of that dishevled tree–even though it wasn’t a rainbow eucalyptus, the tree had a distinct charm of its own. So I was a little sad when […]