Thank goodness for ravines that are inconvenient to build on. This one cuts through the suburbs near my parents’ house. You can hear the Beltway from the spot where I took this picture, but the deer wander by anyway, and the squirrels, and the occasional human. Photo: Helen Fields
Helen
Recently Ann wrote that, in the pandemic, she’d been paying attention to “the world that exists when I’m not noticing it, the world that goes on about its own business.” The other day, the world did something fantastic. It passed through the dust from an asteroid, giving us the Geminids. This is apparently one of […]
Cameron said the other day that she’s feeling a little bit low on perspective right now. First of all: Me, too, Cameron. Me, too. Secondly: For perspective, I recommend the sky. It’s always there, there’s often something happening in it, and the thing that is happening almost never relates to an election. Here are some […]
There are a lot of things that are terrible about 2020, and if I try to think about all of them at once, or even to pick an important one to write about, my head will explode. So today I am picking the least important one: Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes have always loved me. I’m just one […]
On Saturday, I met up with two friends and made art. Now, in this era, “met up with” means “on Zoom.” But “made art” means “made art.” And it’s art that wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. The two friends are Joanna and Harshita, two of my oldest friends. We’ve known each other since we […]
It was an unusual scene, last Tuesday night in a suburb of Washington, D.C. My mom and I were in lawn chairs on the edge of a closed road. My dad was wandering around with his camera on a tripod. A friend sat 10 feet farther down the road in her lawn chair. Strangers came […]
To be fair, the blue jay did warn me. I was walking across a green space near my apartment building, bounded by streets and a transit station and criss-crossed by concrete paths and surrounded by roads. A recent mow–the first in months–had left it looking like a hay field. A hay field with a lot […]
A big black bird was perched up on the corner of a house, one of the nice, big old houses in my neighborhood. “Nice,” “big,” and “old” is about as precise as I can get on architecture. But I can nail down that bird. It was an American crow. It called, a single caw! Its […]