I set down my pen next to a slug the other day, not your garden variety, but a beast of a banana slug near the central California coast under misty morning redwoods. The slug wasn’t so much lumbering as gliding at a hardly perceptible speed over dried leaves, under twigs. Setting the pen down, I […]
Evolution
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 […]
It never hurts to celebrate, again, the oddities of life on Earth. Here’s a piece about a discovery reported in 2017 that reminds us of our humble beginnings. Our microscopic relative might have looked like this. The fossil, waaaaay bigger than real life. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Mouth. Anus. Reproductive bit in between. […]
Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was […]
How can I help? I say this to my daughter all the time. I usually mean it as a redirection for some kind of tantrum, or a snafu in the routine of an average nameless morning. It’s better than saying no or telling her what to do, or worse yet, doing it for her. Each […]
Can plants behave? Can they weigh risk against reward? Do they have personalities? At least one study suggests they can and do—and that we’ve missed their complex behavior in part because they live life at such a different pace. Mimosa pudica, or “sensitive plant” is a frilly plant in the pea family with a wonderful […]
Yesterday I woke up, after sleeping in, to the sound of my husband and 7-year-old son yelling at the screen during the Women’s World Cup final. I came downstairs in time to watch the end, and soon enough I was crying like anything, even though I am not a Sports Person. There was just so […]
The path I take in the mornings has a stream, Stony Run, running along one side. The path and the stream are in a tiny wooded floodplain you could throw a rock across. The floodplain and stream are more or less maintained by Baltimore city and by the surrounding community associations – “maintained” as in, […]
