Yesterday: Urban Lichens, Part 1: OMG! Urban Lichens!, in which we learned that there are lichens in the city. So I’d established that lichens can, sometimes, live in cities. The next step: round up a lichenologist. On a sunny December afternoon, I met up with Manuela Dal Forno, a lichenologist. To be precise, she’s a […]
Helen
It was the big new concrete transit center that brought the lichens to town. In September, a huge new structure opened next to the metro station closest to my office. It has three levels, for buses, more buses, and taxis. It was held up by construction delays and disputes. The county and the transit authority […]
It was a year and a half after my internship at NPR, and I was in the habit of calling Joanne Silberner, who was then on NPR’s staff, for advice whenever I got a terrifying new assignment. I suppose this makes her one of my first journalism mentors. At the time, I’d convinced the magazine […]
This time between Christmas and Twelfth Night, when the three kings arrived at the stable, is a good time to think about my love of Amahl and the Night Visitors, an operetta by Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti. In the story, the three kings stop for the night at the house of a poor single […]
In a fenced-off corner of Washington, D.C, down at the very tip, where the city’s diamond shape meets the Potomac river, is a giant feeding station for gulls. Ok, that’s not its main function. If you have ever pooped in DC, or in parts of four surrounding counties, including Dulles International Airport, you have helped […]
I love walking. This seems like such a silly thing to say, like “I love breathing.” We’re humans, you and me. Walking is our thing. Being bipedal makes us us. But walking is also an activity that I love. It takes me places, it shows me things, it gives me ideas, it calms my nerves. […]
The other day I made a plant friend. My plant friend is some kind of squash. Pumpkin, maybe. It grows along the edge of a community garden that I walk by on my way to work. Like many of those squash-like plants, it uses tendrils to anchor itself, clinging in tight spirals to the fence […]
The equinox is past. At last, fall has come to the northern hemisphere. Some of the ways the new season shows up are obvious. The sunset creeps earlier and earlier as we race toward the winter solstice. The air cools. Pumpkin spice is in every product imaginable. Others are subtler. There’s the spooky Halloween decoration […]